You can measure. One way you measure is years of experience. Another can be time to deliver against a spec. Another can be number/size of defects. Another can be time to remedy defects.

Yes, it's "junior vs senior", but their management is explicitly stating "everyone's experience is relevant, and everyone has an equal voice" and so on. No, the person who has literally never contributed to a production codebase should not have an equal say in the technology stack choice. Their voice is not 'equal' to someone who has delivered consistently for 2 decades.

And... yes, it's largely bad management. He's looking to move. They had rocky mgt for... a year before, but it was tolerable. Leadership changed and my colleague stuck around the last few months to see if things would get better, but they're getting worse.

I've actually met junior 10x engineers, I could tell pretty quickly that they were better than me. I've also met senior 1/10x engineers!

Working with a junior 10x engineer is humbling.

I remember starting out at my first job, realizing I was working with people way better than me (my first office mate had 2 PhDs, IIRC Chemistry and Physics!), but slowly I climbed up the ladder of competence and became that software engineer who was doing the Really Cool Stuff.

Then, new grad joins, and he is quite obviously a full standard deviation to the right of me.

Like, shit. Sure some architect whose name is in Wikipedia, yeah they are better than me, and I've been honored to work with multiple people of that caliber, and when you work with someone whose career is regularly described as "ground breaking", you don't even try to measure up, ya know? But, when someone fresh out of college starts pumping out better code, faster, than anything I can do, just, takes a bit of mental adjustment.

Intellectually, it shouldn't be surprising, after all if there are smarter people who are older, than there are smarter people who are younger!

The one guy I am thinking of (who might be reading this, you know who you are!) is also humble, and eager to learn from everyone around him. It was a delight working with him almost a decade ago, and his career has been great since then.

Thinking about it, I don't even know where I am on the 1-100x scale. I know people who are obvious 100x developers who are the literal one of only a few dozen people in the world who can do the things that they did. During my career I have been responsible for the success of multiple projects that would've fallen to pieces w/o me, and while I was a blatant bus factor of 1. But even then, in all those projects I worked with a group of amazing developers, we all kind of brought different 10x skills to the table, if that makes sense.

Actually, when I was the Bus Factor of 1, it wasn't for my code. The handful of 10x people on the projects were turning out much better code than I ever could. My 10x contribution? I organized, lead, and figured out what code needed to be written, designed systems, and saw the interconnections between the work the various 10x+ devs were doing. My real contribution was spotting patterns, good and bad, and using that recognition to get ahead of future problems, or to organize efforts to put code in place ahead of time in anticipation of future needs.

Heck the project I'm leading right now, it started because I saw a pattern in existing work flows and I started thinking if there was a way to optimize those workflow through better usage of data structures and automation.

Maybe I'm a 10x pattern recognizer.