It's like hiring a plumber and telling them "your job is to create the most impact in my house"... uh, no... how about you tell me what you want or what the problem is, and if you want an overhaul that can be done as well. This whole "create impact" and "add business value" is such a sneaky way to exploit people, and of course there are many people who oblige and just dedicate their entire careers to running a business instead of being engineers and implementing things properly.
If you really don't want to engage in that sort of thing, I'm sure there's a lot of companies that'll let you be a fungible code monkey for pennies…
> As an engineer — in other words: a salaried employee — you're already a businessperson.
An engineer is NOT a business person. I don't recall business fundamentals in computer science classes... but I get it, most companies see full time employees as part of the business that they are responsible for.
The main problem I see is that it becomes an issue as to where the boundaries of the role is, and therefore pushes engineers away from their focus and that leads to more problems down the line. I've seen this so many times in my career and I can attribute it to the fact that orgs do not respect how hard engineering is, so they think they can have this role wear many hats, and then you have applications that are fragile and hard to work with. I get anyone can quit and find a better job, but that's besides the point. "Impact" is just a lazy way for businesses to define roles.
> "Do You Even Want to Be 10x? You don’t have to. You’re not a lesser engineer if you operate at a steady clip, write clean code, and value stable processes. Seriously. Some workplaces thrive on consistent, methodical improvement—and a 10x renegade might actually hurt them."
and yet you don’t actually get to be an engineer if the business is not running and profits are not made - if that happens you get canned and you have to find another place to engineer. the whole purpose of your employment is that you should generate more value to the company than your compensation. people that are not aware of this will have a difficult career in front of them
We're really talking about how the roles are divided in teams within an org, and increasingly engineers are having to worry about non-engineering tasks and I have experienced this causing a lot of issues in the long run for the business.
I'm basically saying that if you make the roles wear too many hats then they can't be experts in their domain and this has consequences sooner or later. One of the ways companies dilute the roles is by telling them to "create impact", instead of say create systems with no bugs and that can be iterated upon quickly.
10x Engineer is possible in a green field environment. In any other scenario, someone like Elon on the top have to own the risk. No middle manager, no senior management want to take on risks.
An untouchable authoritarian oligarch saying "how hard can it be" while taking a blowtorch to societal support structures is going to inflict death and pain on people, the neediest among us.
The Wolf is a much better exemplar of the patterns of a truly effective 10x engineer who makes things better for the business. Were a Wolf to behave like Musk, they would be fired.
