Small Diffs - by Greg Foster

I’m not here to claim that I’m a 10x developer—saying so would be wildly arrogant. But I’ve been around engineering for 15 years, spent time in the trenches with some absolutely brilliant ICs, and helped build engineering tools for folks at Snowflake, Asana, Brex, Ramp, and Square. I co-founded a startup dedicated to making code review faster (and hopefully less painful). Through it all, I’ve seen firsthand what separates the “good” from the unbelievably impactful.

When I say “10x engineer,” I don’t mean someone who writes 10 times more code or who logs the most hours. I mean someone who produces 10 times the impact—on the product, the business, or the users’ actual lives. It’s outcomes-focused, not input-focused.

Let me share a heavily condensed (but still entertaining) anecdote from Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter/X. The company was spending a fortune on a data center in Sacramento. The internal estimate was that migrating 5,200 massive server racks to a cheaper data center in Portland would take months, because, of course, big data centers have all these security protocols, specialized moving equipment, etc.

Musk, being Musk, decided that was too slow. So, in December—right around Christmas—he and a couple of family members literally hopped on a plane, diverted to Sacramento, rented a Toyota Corolla, and started pulling servers themselves. They pried up floor panels with a pocketknife, hired a motley crew from Yelp, and strapped these 2,000-pound racks onto trucks like college kids moving out of a dorm. In a matter of days, they moved hundreds of servers (something that normally would take weeks or even months).

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