Developer productivity doesn't map very directly to compensation. If one engineer is 10x as productive as another, they're lucky if they get 2x the compensation.
A good programmer isn't necessarily also good at business to run his own company.
Sure, you have your John Carmaks' or Antirezs' of the industry who are 10x programmers and also successful founders but those guys are 1 in a million.
But your usual 10x engineer you'll meet is the guy who knows the ins and outs of all running systems at work giving him the ability to debug and solve issues 10x quicker than the rest, knowledge which is highly specific to the products of that company and is often non-transferrable and also not useful at entrepreneurship.
Becoming the 10x engineer at a company usually means pigeonholing yourself in the deep inner workings of the products, which may or may not be useful later. If that stack is highly custom or proprietary it might work in your favor making you the 10x guy virtually unfireable being able to set your own demands since only you can solve the issues, or might backfire against you at a round of layoffs as your knowledge of that specific niche has little demand elsewhere.
> But your usual 10x engineer you'll meet is the guy who knows the ins and outs of all running systems at work giving him the ability to debug and solve issues 10x quicker than the rest
You're talking about the 100x engineer now. The 10x engineer is the normal engineer you are probably accustomed to working with. When you encounter a 1x engineer, you will be shocked at how slow and unproductive they are.
We'd all be millionaires if AI could actually help with that, but then if everyone is a millionaire then nobody is.
Current AI is still at the state of recommending people jump off the golden gate bridge if they feel sad or telling them to change their blinker fluid.
300% is a massive underestimate for someone who is AI native and understands how to prompt and interpret results correctly. In the past I would spend 30-40 minutes hunting around on StackOverflow to get the syntax of a difficult database query or bust out a long regular expression.
With AI I can do the same in 15 seconds. We’re talking a 120x increase in productivity not a 3x improvement.
Agreed, I don’t know why people are so down on ai as a coding assistant here. I concur with everything you said, and will add that now I also have a service that will produce, on-demand, the exact documentation that I need at the exact level of abstraction, and then I can interrogate it at will. These things are huge time savers.
You can easily get 300% productivity improvements if you're using a completely new language but still have enough programming background in order to refine the prompts to get what you want, or if you're debugging an issue and the LLM points you in the right way saving you hours of googling and slamming your head against the wall.
