U-hauling Servers on Christmas: Extreme Straight-Line Engineering
BLUF: 10x engineers find the biggest fires, and execute on extreme straight-line solutions, often stepping on toes in the process
Where’s my opinion come from?
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.
What Is a 10x Engineer?
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.
Does a 10x engineer often crank out code faster than me? Sure.
Do they sometimes have a knack for debugging or a stellar sense of architecture? Absolutely.
But none of that matters if they don’t produce tangible, disproportionate impact.
A Crazy Elon Musk Story
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).
Of course, chaos ensued. Some servers still had user data. NTT, the company that owned the data center, wasn’t thrilled. X missed stable capacity for a bit, which caused meltdown moments—like that infamous Ron DeSantis Twitter Spaces fiasco. But from one angle, it was a 10x success: They slashed a task initially planned for months down to mere days. The cost savings were enormous, but the tradeoff in downtime, staff morale, and sleepless nights was real.
So—both inspiring and cautionary.
(Full story here, it’s a fun one: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/elon-musk-moved-twitter-servers-himself-in-the-night-new-biography-details-his-maniacal-sense-of-urgency.html)
The 10x Formula
What can we take away from that story (and others like it)?
1. Start From the Biggest Problem
Don’t spin your wheels on a 2% optimization if there’s a huge cost sink somewhere else. The best engineers I’ve worked with target the single most important driver of business or user pain. Then they go straight at it like a dog on a bone.
2. Rewrite the Rules (If Needed)
The timeline is “6 months.” Is that actually carved in stone? Maybe if you push or skip steps, you can do it in 3 weeks. Conventional thinking says you need an official moving team, or 27 approvals, or a detailed project plan. A 10x engineer questions all of those assumptions, sometimes ruthlessly.
3. A Big Appetite for Risk
When Musk & Co. started yanking servers, they risked data breaches, hardware damage, and definitely a few lawsuits. That’s an extreme example. But being 10x often means tolerating short-term mess or even stepping on toes if it yields enormous, disproportionate wins. (I’m not saying break the law—just know that 10x speed can come with some friction.)
Uber famously had an original core value of “toe stepping,” but later removed it to limit asshole behavior
4. First-Principles Pragmatism
Musk pried open the floor panel with a knife to see if it was “actually that complicated.” It wasn’t, or at least not as complicated as the vendor made it sound. Similarly, when you find yourself debugging or architecting, ask, “Is there a fundamentally simpler approach if I ignore conventional wisdom for a second?”
5. Own It, Do It, Ship It
This is the difference between someone who complains about blocked JIRA tickets and someone who drives to the data center themselves at midnight. 10x engineers take personal responsibility. They embody “If it has to be done, I’ll figure it out.”
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Examples of Straight-Line Engineering
The Elon story is great, but it isn’t about software engineering. Here are some more relatable examples of achieving root impact ten times faster than default.
Overnight Debug
Your flagship service is crashing in prod, costing thousands per hour. Instead of logging a Jira ticket and waiting for triage, you convene a quick 15-minute huddle with your manager and SRE lead to get sign-off on direct debug logs in production. By 1 a.m., you’ve identified the culprit and shipped a patch, saving days of formal process.
Last-Minute Feature Demo
Sales surprises you: an important client wants a specific feature demo in one week, not the planned three months. You corral product, design, and QA into a mini “war room” and strip the scope to the bare essentials. After a rapid round of Slack approvals, you ship an MVP that impresses the client—ugly corners and all.
Monolith-to-Microservices Blitz
Your team faces a massive, six-month plan to decompose a legacy monolith. When leadership demands tangible progress in a single sprint, you copy the entire codebase into multiple smaller repos overnight. It’s hacky, but now each squad can start carving out features on their own timeline, effectively creating a microservices setup in record time.
Hotfix in Production
A critical security flaw surfaces late on a Friday afternoon. Rather than scheduling an urgent sprint or forming a governance committee, you grab the security lead and DevOps for a quick risk assessment and swift approval. You patch the vulnerable code directly in prod and monitor logs over the weekend, nipping the issue before it becomes a PR nightmare.
Data Pipeline “Weekend Hack”
Your analytics pipeline is bogged down, threatening key reporting SLAs. The official solution—comprehensive refactoring—will take two sprints, so you pitch a fast weekend hack to the data team: bulk-export to staging servers, parallel-process, and re-import Monday morning. Everyone agrees to this duct-tape fix, restoring performance quickly while planning a better long-term approach.
The Human Side Matters
In all these hypotheticals, the real magic isn’t coding or hacking alone. It’s how you question default assumptions and secure rapid alignment:
• You communicate early and clearly about risks.
• You involve the key people needed for sign-off.
• You negotiate a shared understanding of what will be sacrificed short-term.
That’s often the difference between a 10x solution and a reckless one. A solution is “reckless” when you bulldoze ahead solo and surprise everyone. A “10x solution” is when you do that same direct path with your team’s backing and an agreed-upon plan to handle any fallout.
The Very Real Downsides
1. Collateral Damage
Elon’s server escapade cost some employees their Christmas Eve, put user data at risk, and caused company leaders to freak out. Similarly, doing things at 10x speed can blow up your personal life, damage trust, or lead to corners cut. If everyone at your company tried to do this all the time, you’d have pure chaos.
2. Accumulated Mess
Shaving 10 months off a project often means the code is loaded with duct tape. You can fix that later—hopefully—but you might end up with 100 small fires that never get the attention they deserve. If you keep sprinting from big problem to big problem, you eventually need a “cleanup day.” Or three.
3. Burnout and Thanklessness
Putting in heroic hours and ignoring conventional processes can be exhilarating at first. But if you rely on external praise, you might end up feeling under-appreciated. Sometimes a 10x success will just lead people to assume that’s your normal pace and set expectations even higher next time.
4. Not for Everyone, Not All the Time
Realistically, not everyone wants (or needs) to operate at 10x mania. Teams also need methodical, detail-oriented engineers who ensure quality and keep the lights on when the 10x folks inevitably break something.
Do You Even Want to Be 10x?
You don’t have to. You’re not a lesser engineer if you operate at a steady clip, write clean code, and value stable processes. Seriously. Some workplaces thrive on consistent, methodical improvement—and a 10x renegade might actually hurt them.
But if you do see a chance to drive massive impact and want to push every lever you’ve got, here’s the short version:
Identify the biggest, hairiest problem.
Forget the usual timeline—ask how you can do it 10 times faster.
Accept the possibility of chaos, conflict, or short-term ugliness.
Get scrappy, do the work yourself if you must, and don’t stop until it’s done.
Success here is measured by the impact on customers, revenue, or critical product metrics—not by how many new lines of code you wrote or how impressed your peers are with your commit history. And even if you choose not to execute on the straight line path, sometimes brainstorming can be a worthwhile exercise in planning.
There’s a misconception that 10x is just about being the smartest person in the room, writing immaculate code at superhuman speed. Really, it’s about focusing relentlessly on results, questioning constraints, and taking personal ownership. It can be exhilarating, disruptive, and at times disastrous.
But if you deploy it wisely—knowing the tradeoffs—you can occasionally pull off the impossible, shave months off timelines, and deliver massive wins. And if that’s something you’re itching to do, hopefully now you have a playbook. Just remember: “best practices” exist for a reason, and you’ll eventually have to come back to clean up your trail of destruction.
Pick your battles. Keep your eye on the prize. And if you decide to be a 10x engineer for a moment—do it with clear intent, accept the risks, and own the outcome. After all, impact is the name of the game. Everything else is just process.