Imagine taking pride in your craft rather than doing only the bare minimum to pad your ego, what a crazy approach!
I've been in the industry long enough now to see those 10x engineers having pride in their work get their mindset shattered because John from financials thinks they can juice the next quarter by laying them off.
If you want to have pride in your work as a supposed 10x engineer, work at 2x or 3x and save the remaining for yourself.
One (engineer-turned) manager I have in mind: show up at 10am, leave at 4pm, solve a zillion hard problems in the mean time. Are they 10x? If they save me 2 weeks of work with their insight then I guess I have to admit yes.
Lots of people are happy to just do whatever, go home and not work on personal projects. Plenty of people here defend it.
Why should productive engineers change their habits just not to be called a sucker?
I mean more that the optimal amount of work to put in is still above average but way below 10x