Let’s Lead From “10x” AI Engineers to 3x AI Teams
The word “no” is a powerful word in anyone’s career. - Justin Theroux There is a mythical figure in software engineering: the 10x engineer is someone who is ten times more productive than their peers by accumulating a toolkit of personal efficiencies. When I was fresh out of college in my first software development job, I was a 10x engineer. I knew it, I loved it, and I generally kept it to myself. I consistently beat my estimates, but I used my efficiency to build systems that were 10x better written and tested, not to pump out 10x as many features. The core of my secret sauce as a Java developer was, first and foremost, being a solid engineer. Second was aggressively leveraging Perl to automate my environment and workflow. While our "build master" struggled to manage a clunky Windows batch file, I set up a nightly Perl cron job that pulled and compiled both the latest codebase and the stable release. Everything was ready on my desktop the second I walked into the offic...