10X Developer and the POC Trap

Source: Dev.to

Meeting the 10X Dev

In my web development career, I’ve worked with three “10X” (or “cracked”) developers across three different projects. They are amazing at work: they complete more tickets per sprint than the rest of the team combined, work 12+ hours a day, skip weekends, rarely take leave, and most importantly, they can deliver a proof‑of‑concept (POC) in less than a week or two—a bond they might be cursed with forever.

POC Hero

A 10X developer’s relationship with POCs often begins with an ambitious feature request. The lead proposes a POC, feasibility analysis, and user acceptance tests. “But we don’t have much time,” says the product manager, and looks to the 10X developer: “We can do this in two weeks, right?”

The developer grinds for two weeks and delivers a prototype that’s “good enough.” It passes testing, is merged into the main project, and the feature is considered a success.

A new request arrives, and the same developer builds another prototype. This time it fails testing, and the feature is marked not feasible, saving months of development time—another success.

Over time, sprint after sprint, the 10X developer gets assigned more and more POC work. Eventually they stop doing bug fixes, enhancements, upgrades, or maintenance; all they do now is create POCs. Every big and small feature now needs a POC, and the 10X developer handles it.

From Hero to Bottleneck

As POC work piles up, the developer has less time to actually work on each prototype. Quality drops from “good enough” to barely functional, and clever but garbage code appears—hard to understand and a nightmare to maintain. Once a prototype is merged, the developer moves on to the next POC, leaving the current feature unfinished. That work is often reassigned to someone else on the team (sometimes you).

You realize the prototype that was “supposedly” built to handle edge cases barely works even on the happy path. Product believes the prototype accounts for future specs, but you know it only covers the current ones.

The developer becomes detached from real‑world project work, living in a perpetual POC world where everything is a green‑field project. Their system never breaks; it’s always someone else’s faulty code, and they don’t have time to fix it because ten more POCs await. Now it’s your responsibility to fix the broken pieces.

They start shipping more features in a quarter than the rest of the team combined in a year. Meanwhile, you have less time to stabilise the prototype and get it into production. The 10X developer assures you it’s already “production‑ready,” but the “cloth” has multiple holes.

Team Fatigue and Burnout

Eventually, everyone on the team resents having to pick up the pieces from the 10X developer’s prototypes. No one wants to work with them anymore. What was once an outlier becomes the baseline. People start burning out, leaving the project, and with each departure the project slips from bearable to broken.

A thriving codebase and a colourful team become a barren, forgotten land.