> He literally wrote the bulk of a multi-million line system, most of the code is still running today without much change and powering a unicorn level business
I've been a bit of that engineer (though not at the same scale), like say wrote 70% of a 50k+ loc greenfield service. But I'm not sure it really means I'm 10x. Sometime this comes from just being the person allowed to do it, that doesn't get questioned in it's design choices, decisions of how to structure and write the code, that doesn't get any push back on having massive PRs where others almost just paper stamp it.
And you can really only do this at the greenfield phase, when things are not yet in production, and there's so much baseline stuff that's needed in the code.
But it ends up being the 80/20 rule, I did the 80% of the work in 20% of the time it'll take to go to prod, because that 20% remaining will eat up 80% of the time.
I've been a bit of that engineer (though not at the same scale), like say wrote 70% of a 50k+ loc greenfield service. But I'm not sure it really means I'm 10x. Sometime this comes from just being the person allowed to do it, that doesn't get questioned in it's design choices, decisions of how to structure and write the code, that doesn't get any push back on having massive PRs where others almost just paper stamp it.
And you can really only do this at the greenfield phase, when things are not yet in production, and there's so much baseline stuff that's needed in the code.
But it ends up being the 80/20 rule, I did the 80% of the work in 20% of the time it'll take to go to prod, because that 20% remaining will eat up 80% of the time.