“Ship speed is the ranking, and every teammate is a row above me.” The 10x-engineer number came from a 1968 study of toy tasks — most speed variance belongs to the task, not the person. The scoreboard measures neither.
WIPE_SCRIPTS
The Science of Engineering Pace: Why Comparing Velocity Is the Wrong Metric
21 scripts this research explains — "She ships twice as fast as me — I must not be cut out for this" is the kind of thought software engineers rehearse cons
“Visible hours are proof of value; a quiet Slack dot is a confession.” SPACE-framework research is blunt: raw activity is the weakest productivity signal there is — but the script bills you overtime for it anyway, and a quarter of devs are paying every month.
The Presence Theater
“If the system doesn't need me, the company doesn't either.” So designs get clever instead of simple, and critical work never gets handed off — you build job security the way you'd build a single point of failure, because that's what it is.
The Indispensability Proof
“Interruptions mean I'm not in control of my time, and I'm failing at real work.” Attention residue (Leroy, 2009) is real: part of your mind stays on Task A while you're doing Task B, and recovery takes ~23 minutes. But fragmented days are a feature of collaborative work, not proof of weakness.
The Context-Switch Guilt
- Every interruption proves I can't protect my own time
- I should be able to switch tasks instantly without losing focus
- The day feels wasted if I didn't get deep work in
- Slack messages are stealing my real work
- I felt guilty for being interrupted and not staying focused
- Meetings are killing my productivity
- A good engineer doesn't need recovery time after switching contexts
- I should be able to say no to interruptions
- Fragmented days mean I failed at time management
- Staying late is how I reclaim the deep work I lost to meetings