Early in your career, you optimize for personal speed. You want to close tickets, ship features, and prove you can deliver.

But as you advance, you realize that optimizing for your speed often slows down the team.

If you write clever code that only you understand, you create technical debt. If you hoard knowledge to be the “go-to” person, you become a bottleneck.

The best engineers I’ve worked with aren’t just fast coders. They’re multipliers.

This idea is well captured in the book “Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter” by Liz Wiseman. Great leaders don’t try to be the smartest person in the room, they make everyone else smarter instead.

In practice, that looks like this:

• Writing documentation that saves others hours of debugging
• Building tools that automate tasks for the whole team
• Mentoring juniors so everyone levels up

Being a high-impact engineer isn’t about output. It’s about leverage.

It’s about making the people around you better, faster, and more confident in their work.