Is the 10x engineer still a thing?
A CTO friend can no longer pick out the 10x engineers on his team, because agentic coding has turned every capable engineer into one.
I had an interesting conversation with a CTO friend of mine recently. He told me he always used to be able to pinpoint the 10x engineers on his team, but since agentic development took over he’s finding it very hard to tell who they are.
The volume and speed of development have gone up for everyone, to the point where pretty much the whole team is now shipping at the pace those few used to. Essentially everyone has become that original 10x engineer, but those same people haven’t gone on to become 100x engineers. Agentic coding has turned out to be a real leveller for people who are capable.
The only thing it’s highlighted, he reckons, is the people who weren’t very good in the first place - the ones who can’t convey a feature end to end, or describe the infrastructure they need to build. An agent builds whatever you describe to it, so if you can’t describe the thing, all that speed is no use to you.
So is the 10x engineer still a thing? I’d say it is, but 10x is now simply what any good engineer does, so it’s stopped telling you who your best people are. The ones who stand out are those who know what to build and how it all fits together, which is why true software architects have become paramount to business success. A team of five, ten or fifteen top-level architects would beat a team of a hundred developers from five years ago.