We hired a 10x developer. Then we lost the team.
He was brilliant. Shipped features in days that took others weeks. Refactored entire modules overnight. Solved problems nobody else could touch.
Within six months, the codebase was his. Complex, elegant, and incomprehensible to everyone else. The warning sign we missed: he rewrote colleagues’ PRs instead of coaching them through improvements.
Within twelve months, three engineers had quit. “I don’t feel like I’m learning anything.” “I can’t contribute meaningfully.” “Everything I touch, he rewrites.”
Within eighteen months, he left for a bigger challenge. Behind him: a system only he understood, a team that had stopped growing, and a six-month recovery to make the code maintainable again.
The math looked good on paper. One person doing the work of ten. But the hidden cost: five people operating at 0.3x while waiting for him to review their work, explain his decisions, or simply notice they existed.
10x productivity doesn’t scale if it creates 0.1x teams.
The lesson: individual output is a vanity metric. Team output is what ships products. The difference between a high performer and high impact on the team is everything. A great engineer who suppresses everyone around them isn’t a 10x hire. They’re a team-sized liability.
How much of your critical code can only be explained by one person?