I’m a cynic but I wish that were true. In my past experience it has usually been the opposite, the bulk of engineers are making unnecessary tools, re-inventing wheels, and designing systems that shouldn’t exist and serve as roadblocks to the minority of engineers who are miraculously getting things done in spite of all that.

The 100x impact isn’t usually with proofs of concept, it’s with surgery. 1,000 lawyers would likely never identify and execute the life-saving graft, all while avoiding side effects that eventually kill the patient.

A surgical ten lines of code across 5 services can absolutely create billions of dollars out of thin air. The combination of technical, political and domain expertise required for such changes is relatively rare.

(I mean political in the purest, non-controversial sense, i.e. the communication skills to answer objections and acquire group consensus on the required change.)

Meta-question: does the cognizance, cohesion and awareness that goes into identifying that 1% emerge from the 99% quotient of inefficient aimless wandering, or somewhere else?

Meta-meta-question: assuming that it does, how does the line get described (let alone drawn) dividing "this work contributes to identifying the 1%" from "this is a waste of time"?

(Insert something about gradient descent and local vs global maximums here)

I'll call this a genuine question, I could definitely use some refinement of my own optimization of this problem space (and not wind up in micro-optimized dead ends etc).

> the challenge is knowing beforehand what the most impactful engineering work is going to be

If the payoff in the 1% case is high enough, then you don't have to know beforehand! Just do all 100 changes and the one winner pays for all the rest.

Everyone on HN is 10x. Lol

You need a bench. Some of the brilliant folks who are great at pushing through problems are awful and maintenance and sustainment. I worked for a bit in a SWAT engineering team tasked with addressing crisis problems or emergency response. If you don’t have people you’re developing on the bench, you won’t be able to respond to those types of things and will get bogged down with tech debt.

I was a faux “10x” person because I had license to break the rules to get shit done - because the value of what we were doing was higher than the cost of cleaning up the mess. (Not because of any brilliance on my or the teams part) We did two years worth of work in a month, but it’s still being refactored 3 years later.

What extra steps? It's literally a Pareto-type rule. He's also probably right, but not because only a small fraction of a company's engineers are any good. It's more that a lot of engineering work is done for reasons that are more speculative than people realize.