It's not always about being FUCKING SMART, sometimes just having a different attitude helps.
I've worked with testers who refused to write code but would rather test everything manually (and fall behind on every sprint!), while stupid (yes), you could easily come in and be a 100X more productive by just writing tests as code.
For one company I worked for we had an old legacy system (running DOS) that we used to produce master copies of our disk images. When we needed a new master it would take the better part of a day to make all parts work. I wrote a program that could do what the legacy system did but under Windows, taking a couple of seconds to run and now we could get a master image as a build artifact. I don't consider myself FUCKING SMART, quite the opposite, especially at that company with those coworkers who were despite the sound of it actually really smart, but unlike my coworkers I had not accepted the situation but felt that there must be something to do to improve it.
> I don't consider myself FUCKING SMART, quite the opposite, especially at that company with those coworkers who were despite the sound of it actually really smart, but unlike my coworkers I had not accepted the situation but felt that there must be something to do to improve it.
This is the secret sauce. The impulse to solve the higher order problem and the willingness to question fundamental assumptions in order to arrive at a solution.
Your non-10x devs might have attempted to optimize the DOS system, or maybe even introducing some kind of caching and just lived with the somewhat mitigated performance.
I agree and have a similar story to yours about improving an old system. At a previous company we had a deployment process that took 1 developer 6 hours to complete. There was a 6 page run-sheet of manual instructions (create Windows image; log in and set these parameters; install this software; etc.)
I took a couple of days to automate the process and reduced the deploy time to something that could be done multiple times a day and didn't require a developer. Am I FUCKING SMART? No, but I was able to see the bigger picture and realize that there are tools that could be applied to this problem.
It's not always about being FUCKING SMART, sometimes just having a different attitude helps.
I've worked with testers who refused to write code but would rather test everything manually (and fall behind on every sprint!), while stupid (yes), you could easily come in and be a 100X more productive by just writing tests as code.
For one company I worked for we had an old legacy system (running DOS) that we used to produce master copies of our disk images. When we needed a new master it would take the better part of a day to make all parts work. I wrote a program that could do what the legacy system did but under Windows, taking a couple of seconds to run and now we could get a master image as a build artifact. I don't consider myself FUCKING SMART, quite the opposite, especially at that company with those coworkers who were despite the sound of it actually really smart, but unlike my coworkers I had not accepted the situation but felt that there must be something to do to improve it.