A few years ago, a data engineer on r/ExperiencedDevs got drunk and wrote down everything he learned in 10 years of engineering. The original account is deleted, but the post captures something real — the kind of honesty you only get after a few glasses of wine. Preserving it here, typos and all.

Contains the language you’d expect from someone who opened with ‘I’m drunk’.

You might have already heard of a 10x engineer. Probably too often, actually. If there's such a thing as a 10x engineer, surely there must be a 1x engineer, too?

Of course there is! Let's dig into a non-exhaustive list of what qualities make up a 1x engineer.