Whether it be drugs, cybernetic enhancements, mental discipline and training, and changes in diet, I’d eschew all of them (maybe except for diet improvement) and instead advocate for this: engineers should stop taking work so seriously.

I don’t really care if I’m working to 100% of my potential. My employer won’t pay me more for that optimization anyway.

I think there’s something of a toxic attitude in Silicon Valley that we should all be honing ourselves into this amazing constantly-tinkering engineer who runs a really cool blog. There’s also a general toxic mentality in America that we can all work our way to becoming billionaires - in reality, none of us can optimize our way into having family connections to the elites in our society. In reality, that engineer doing all that cool stuff in the Bay Area in their shared studio apartment probably doesn’t have a better retirement plan than the community college sysadmin with a paid-off single family home in upstate New York.

For me, I just work to put food on the table. I want to be average enough to he employable. Anything beyond that isn’t worth the diminishing return on investment, or a reduction in family time.

I can’t optimize my way to being genetically gifted enough to match the output of the 10x engineers who do get promoted, and I certainly can’t match their 24/7 dedication to work. Employers generally promote people for making the right person happy at the right time, not for producing the most technically competent work.