Why don't companies pay 50x engineers 50x?

There's another reason, too -- which is that a "50x engineer" will very rarely be 50x on most development tasks.

Your 50x engineer may be able to build a highly performant and complex algorithm by themselves, truly in a week where other engineers might take a year.

But 99% of programming isn't that. It's CRUD apps and configuration files and debugging browser quirks and hunting down race conditions etc.

Your "50x engineer" probably isn't going to be all that faster solving a CSS bug or putting together an online order form or configuring Apache.

So even if companies could identify programming geniuses... they mostly don't have genius-level work to give them, so there's no use in paying 50x anyways.

Reddit famously had a team of four for a surprising number of years.

I myself am the sole developer for a B2B software company with $5M ARR.

I'm not 50x (or even 10x) and don't think those designations are based in reality, but your second sentence doesn't follow from the first.

You kind of can, up to like seed level anyways.

I think the real 50x engineer is a person who is a strong engineer, also does design, innovates, and can build a business like a CEO. That person could actually bring 50x value to a small org.

In a company I've worked for, the "bests" were given the projects with mostly clean slates, and were rewarded for coding quickly, meanwhile the other developers struggled to integrate everything together and refactors were often frowned upon "to not waste time on the delivery of the project". And of course only "the bests" were authorized to work on those new clean slates projects. This gave rise to a very nasty positive feedback cycle where none of the original devs remained at the end of the project.

But it is true that the actual bests are 5 to 50 times more productive. I've seen it mainly with specialized consultants. Need to fix your tool chain? You can be sure that the build master consultant will be worth every pennies to fix those obscure C++ linking errors. Need to patch the kernel and even send the patch to Linus? Again, I wouldn't be surprised if you get a 100x ratio compared to a mid seniority dev who never did that.

From my experiences, the high productivity ratio between low end devs and high end devs stem from the multiple multiplicative factors that goes into making programming more efficient. Knowing how to automate repetitive work with scripts, typing fast and having a good knowledge of the appropriate tools and frameworks will help each other exponentially.

It can still be difficult to tease out how much of any win is due to a single player, I think maybe the key difference is that the games are played in public and only one team can win a game.

So I, as a team owner, can watch Strasbourg pitch, see him nullify my lineup, then I have almost all the information I need to know he really is a lot better than average.

Additionally, by being willing to pay more and getting him on my team I'm depriving my opponents of his talent.

There is no direct analogue in programming, besides maybe open source projects.