Headcount goals, feature factories, and when to hire those mythical 10x people

A former CTO at Better.com explores why some companies rationally hire average engineers over high-output ones. Using a simple mathematical model, the post shows that task overhead (Jira tickets, CI waits, PR bookkeeping) significantly diminishes the productivity advantage of senior engineers. The key insight: the optimal engineer productivity level to hire for is directly tied to how much task overhead exists in your organization. High overhead environments benefit from cheaper, average engineers; low overhead environments justify paying top dollar for 10x engineers. Two actionable conclusions emerge: centralize recruiting to maintain a consistent bar, and ruthlessly reduce per-task overhead to unlock the ROI of senior talent.