The Myth of the Ten‑Ex Engineer Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Leverage

4/20/2025

Imagine, if you will, a lone developer lit only by the blue‑white glow of three ultra-wide monitors, fingers clacking at a tempo that would alarm even the most caffeinated woodpecker. Product managers hover, slack‑jawed, as Jira tickets fall like Soviet statues.¹

This, friends, is the Ten‑Ex Engineer: Silicon Valley’s answer to Bigfoot, Elvis, and the Loch Ness Monster rolled into one. And just like those legends, the creature is easier to spot on a VC slide deck than in the wild. Let’s talk about why that matters, and why the real magic trick isn’t typing faster, it’s bending reality with leverage.

Where the Legend Hatched–A Brief Archaeology of Hype

In 1968, back when “debugger” meant a literal vacuum tube that kept shorting, the Sackman‑Erikson‑Grant study found a 10–20× spread in programmer productivity.² The valley promptly tattooed 10× on its collective bicep and never looked back.

Lost in the retweets: those wild differences arose from tooling, domain familiarity, and whether the poor bugger was forced to code in assembly while their rival got the new‑fangled “high‑level language.”³ In other words, context, not chromosome.

But nuance, as you know, is the natural enemy of a good LinkedIn post. So the meme persists: somewhere out there is a dev who will single‑handedly rescue your roadmap, preferably before lunch and preferably for equity only.⁴

Lines of Code Are Just Fancy Litter

Scenario: Bob writes 1,000 lines of baroque TypeScript to add dark mode. Alice deletes 1,200 lines of vintage tech‑debt so gnarly it required a hazmat suit and a team of priests. Who helped the team more?

If you said “Alice,” you’ve tasted the bittersweet joy of subtraction—the negative space where real elegance lives. New code is a liability dressed as progress; every line you keep alive is a Tamagotchi that must be fed and watered forever.

Great engineers don’t compose symphonies of code; they gnash, grind and smash until only the hook remains. Twinkle Twinkle is much easier to maintain, adapt and update than Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551, Jupiter, and is therefore a superior piece of music–from an engineers perspective.

Doing the Boring Math (The Part PR Folks Skip)

Let’s pit our mythical Ten-Ex Hero against a Leverage Goblin:

Our Shiny & Burly Ten‑Ex Hero:

Builds whiz‑bang feature in 1 day, vs. 10 for normies
Generates visible glory and demo day applause.⁵
Annual impact of ~$100k ARR uplift.
Scaling factor: none

Our cave-dwelling Leverage Goblin:

Spends 3 days on script that shaves 6 min off every CI run
Somebody says “CI felt snappier?” in stand‑up
~$60 k engineer time saved (and growing)
Scaling factor: Exponential (^ team size)

One looks heroic; the other quietly wins compound interest. Guess which one recruiters and founders brag about on podcasts?⁶

Some Common Leverage Patterns

1. The Fanatical Re‑Router

Nukes the service nobody dares touch, then watches on‑call pages plummet like crypto in [insert year].⁷ This is an act of enormous self sacrifice, where the upside will go entirely unnoticed by the powers that be, but the downside could be infinite.

This fearless maniac is a hero among the dev team. Spoken about only in whispers. Their work is not understood or discussed by anyone but the most fanatical project managers– and they are the first person to get laid off. After all, everything runs smoothly now.

2. The Cron‑Job Confessional

Automate the thing you’re ashamed to do by hand–schema backfills, reports, data backups–and earn passive kudos for eternity.

A less glorious position amongst your peers, but appreciated nonetheless. A good automater can increase leverage with strong communication of tasks where the outputs can be translated easily into businessese. We couldn't possibly sack Smith, who else would produce the weekly reports. Of course, nobody realises Smith has already automated their entire job and is currently at brunch⁸.

3. The preacher of the Gospel of Type‑System

Swap runtime whoopsies for compile‑time facepalms; future you will write an ode in your honour.

I have spent a large part of my career evangelising the gospel of types. I cut my teeth in the era of what we lovingly called "rolling logs"–persistent bugs that caused hard-to-find problems that plagued our users with total invisibility to management.

Some of the other developers initially hate the Church of Type Safety, but will come around eventually. The upside of a more stable product is not splashy or sexy but it does compound your ARR. User delight, time in app, NPS, whatever your preferred metric Type Safety improves these.

Talent Is Nice; Leverage Is Thermonuclear

Raw skill is real–some devs refactor like Mozart on Red Bull. But without leverage, genius is a sparkler: bright, brief, mildly hazardous to drapes and soft furnishings. Add leverage and it’s a laser drilling holes in Saturn.

Look for these telltale signs to spot a Ten-Ex developer in an interview:

“I close 50 PRs a week.”

"I have a >1000 day productivity streak on GitHub"

"I rewrote this service in go, and then rust and now I'm working on handling user requests purely through willpower."

"I am running a our production server on a lawn chair"

"I delivered more code during my vacation than the entire team did in Q1."

Whereas our leverage obsessed unsung hero will say things like:

"My favourite commit was –23,000 LoC."

"I seem to spend more time thinking than coding."

"I managed to fix a lot of tech debt when I was coding this new feature."

Leverage doesn't usually shout or boast, and if it did the product manager wouldn't particularly care anyway. But it does make things better.

Institutionalising Leverage

Getting the buy in for leverage engineering can be an uphill battle. You are fighting to institutionalise something that is good for the code and good for the business⁹. There are some strategies you can use as an engineer to build the big leverage wins into your daily practise.

Budget for Boring Call it "engineering capital," "tech‑debt sprint," or "The Week We Pull the Weeds." Whatever you need to call it to get buy in–just do it.
Celebrate Negative Diffs Host a Code Deletion Derby. First prize: a hoodie that says rm ‑rf is my cardio.
Teach Monetary Units Show junior devs how a 4‑line Terraform tweak saved $12 k/month. They’ll never un-see the dollar signs¹⁰.

Epilogue: The Quiet Tuesday Test

You’ll know leverage is winning when Tuesdays feel suspiciously calm. Fewer “quick syncs,” fewer PagerDuty ulcers, more stretches of flow so deep you forget to hydrate.

No one will throw you a parade. The CFO may assume “things just got easier” via cosmic luck, product will stop complaining and deployments become a non-event. Leverage, like good infrastructure, is most miraculous precisely when nothing happens–no outages, no heroics, just an engineering team purring like a well‑fed cat. And that, dear reader, is worth as much code as you can delete.

Footnotes

¹ They’ll later boast about “moving fast,” neglecting to mention the debris field of unpaid tech debt.

² Sackman, Erikson & Grant, IBM Systems Journal–from a time when men wore ties to write FORTRAN and drank scotch for breakfast.

³ Assembly vs. PL/I is hardly a fair fight; it’s like timing two home bakers, one with a Magimix and all the high end accoutrements, and the other with a whisk made of dental floss.

⁴ This is the one that will hit, I can feel it–I repeat as I slowly melt into a puddle of bugs and Jira tickets.

⁵ See also: front end developers–AKA glory hounds vs back end developers–the pager plebs

⁶ Glossy decks crave glossy heroes.

⁷ The crytpo winter of [insert year] was nothing like the crypto winter of [insert other year]. It's impossible to learn any lessons from this.

⁸ Godspeed Smith, those mimosas won't drink themselves.

⁹ This is the engineering equivalent of eating your vegetables and stretching after workouts–it doesn't have a big splashy impact but it keeps the body healthy and keeps you lumbering on.

¹⁰ If you are a startup and your team is all under 25 and have no life experience or a big company where your engineers are insulated from cost this can be the biggest piece of leverage available to you.

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