Generally I agree that coworkers who help make everybody more productive are a valuable asset to any company, and that culture should be encouraged. But your math is way off:
...Numbers don't lie. This may be silly, but if you make 25 people 10% more productive then your impact (...) is bigger than this mythical 10x.
False. If you - one person - make 25 people more productive, then the 'bonus' productivity you bring to the organization is (1.1 * 25) - (1.0 * 25), or 2.5 extra units of work. This would make you, effectively, a 3.5x engineer. (Because you bring your own +1 unit of productivity, in addition to the 2.5 units you coaxed out of your peers.)
I have no idea how you arrived at 1.1**25 -- that might represent the output of a single 1x engineer helped by 25 other "1.1x" peers -- each one helping the original engineer be 10% more productive, but obviously at this point the math breaks down and things get silly. Even in a super supportive environment like that, there would be diminishing returns on each successive coworker's help. Each one of those employees is not going to be 10 times as productive as they otherwise would have been, regardless of how much help they get.
Generally I agree that coworkers who help make everybody more productive are a valuable asset to any company, and that culture should be encouraged. But your math is way off:
...Numbers don't lie. This may be silly, but if you make 25 people 10% more productive then your impact (...) is bigger than this mythical 10x.False. If you - one person - make 25 people more productive, then the 'bonus' productivity you bring to the organization is (1.1 * 25) - (1.0 * 25), or 2.5 extra units of work. This would make you, effectively, a 3.5x engineer. (Because you bring your own +1 unit of productivity, in addition to the 2.5 units you coaxed out of your peers.)
I have no idea how you arrived at 1.1**25 -- that might represent the output of a single 1x engineer helped by 25 other "1.1x" peers -- each one helping the original engineer be 10% more productive, but obviously at this point the math breaks down and things get silly. Even in a super supportive environment like that, there would be diminishing returns on each successive coworker's help. Each one of those employees is not going to be 10 times as productive as they otherwise would have been, regardless of how much help they get.
Same thought. The calculation doesn't make sense to me.
However, making 3.5x impact is huge imo.