I was a 10x engineer and I’m sorry
&gt; Because I had special skills it meant that I was being relied upon more to do work that no one else could do.<p>This is a textbook example of a bad system with a single failure point&#x2F;bottleneck. One way to be considered &quot;10x&quot; is to be the only person with the know-how to keep a critical function afloat.<p>We really don&#x27;t learn from history. Eli Goldratt wrote about this in his book The Goal--publication date 1984. Context was manufacturing but it&#x27;s easy to see the principles at work and consider them in other contexts.<p>Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr wrote about this in a DevOps context in The Phoenix Project--publication date 2013.<p>These are just two examples of individuals who wrote books with mass market appeal that read like novels to illustrate their points. Many, many other people have thought and written about how to avoid building bad systems. And yet still, in 2019, as this 10x discussion flares up again, it&#x27;s a myopic view of the individual without a scent or sight of talking about bottlenecks or systems.<p>Sometimes I&#x27;m in awe of Startupland and Tech World&#x27;s accomplishments. Other times I&#x27;m in awe of what it doesn&#x27;t even know it doesn&#x27;t know.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Goal_(novel)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Goal_(novel)</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;17255186-the-phoenix-project" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;17255186-the-phoenix-pro...</a>