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

It's rare for FAANG to pay over $1m total comp for an individual contributor unless you're a renowned superstar.

There's probably thousands of ICs at those companies who have delivered millions in recurring value, though. At Google scale, a single engineer could deliver 8 figures in value or more.

If you want to extract 50x you'll need to be a people manager. And in my experience, most 10x+ engineers are really bad at leading people. It's hard to be amazing at engineering and amazing at people management.

This is a very stupid article.

Elite sports talent gets paid on the ability to win, which increases ticket/ad revenue and helps the coaching staff retail their jobs. There is also a very small pool of pro-level athletes in a country, in the US around 2,000 elite, pro athletes. An example is NFL quarterbacks: has there ever been too many available?

None of the above applies to programmers.

Additionally, most mgmt. staff cannot tolerate IC's making more than them, both because of envy and the optics of an IC contributing more than their manager. (I know multiple IT salesmen who were forced out because they earned several times more in commission than the CEO was paid. You would think profitability came first, but nope.)

Elite programmers have to start their own companies if they want to earn what they're contributing.

This struck me because I find the 10x claim pretty suspect (at least as it's usually characterized). 50X is just myth inflation.

Interesting. I would be curious about if it's the engineering ability that makes them get such high salaries or it’s something else.

In my mind and experience, a "10x engineer" (not sure I'm ready for the "50x" term) gets (or should get) that distinction because they write high quality, fault tolerant, secure, performant, well documented code, AND they empower their teammates. It usually has very little to do with the speed in which they accomplish all of that, which I think is why management has a hard time identifying who they are.

They may think the engineer who fixes 10 bugs a week is their best asset. But what about the engineer who quietly created high quality code with very few bugs, that's extremely easy to maintain?

A "10x engineer" gets that distinction because their software provides dividends in quality and maintainability for years and years, even if the initial implementation took them a seemingly long time. But management often just sees the engineer who's closing the tickets the fastest, even if that person's code becomes a curse on the company for years to come.

It doesn't help that so many teams are focused on 2 week sprints and quarterly goals. That kind of work favors a certain type of engineer, and incentives short term solutions.