Article · 10 min read

Your 10x Engineer Might Be a Bus Factor of 1

Pavel Shpin · MindCTO Free Intermediate

Written from a fractional CTO's chair, this reframes your best solo developer as a risk to actively de-risk, not just an asset to celebrate. It is practical about the exact habits (commits, docs, shared access) that keep one strong person from becoming a hostage situation. Good for a nontechnical founder who wants to know what to insist on.

  • A brilliant lone developer can be your biggest concentration of risk
  • Insist on shared access, clear commits, and written decisions from the start
  • De-risking key people is a management job, not a technical one

The question it answers

  1. Is it a mistake to hire one developer to build my whole product alone?

Read with it

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