I'd expect that eventually the so-called "10x engineer" (if they have any kind of business acumen) eventually finds their way into a role where they are paid proportionally to their productivity, whether that's by becoming a business owner or by an explicit profit-share arrangement.

In the meantime, of course, it's as you say - and in fact they may be paid less, because they're spending their energy on engineering instead of political maneouvering.

“eventually finds their way into a role where they are paid proportionally to their productivity”

I don’t think that’s true. There are plenty of people who do great work but aren’t good at necessary self promotion. Or they just want to stay where they are. So they are very productive but are paid pretty much like everybody else.

I have had the pleasure of working with several truly outstanding engineers over the last few decades. My experience is that they're generally happy if they get to keep doing what they love and excel at (coding) and don't mind that they're "only" paid 1.5-2x the industry norm for Joe/Jane Average programmer. Joe/Jane are getting paid enough to be very comfortable and 1.5-2x that is extremely comfortable.

>There's little salary difference between a "good" and "mediocre" programmer.

An essential condition for things to be commodities is that they're fungible. If we accept that your "good" and "mediocre" programmers are commodities, there's no basis to call them "good" and "mediocre" because they're fungible to their employer. And if there's a basis to do that, how are they fungible ?

> If we accept that your "good" and "mediocre" programmers are commodities, there's no basis to call them "good" and "mediocre" because they're fungible to their employer.

Being fungible doesn't imply that there is no quality difference between goods. It just means the quality difference is irrelevant to the purchaser. Stationeries are viewed as commodities by most businesses but I can still distinguish a good pen from a bad one.

> The so-called "10x" engineer, myth or not, is likely to make just 10% more than their peers, if even that, not 1000% more.

That doesn't seem right. An entry level programmer will make around $100k. There are definitely engineers out there that are paid more than a million a year

I don't know what bubble you are living in where 100k is an entry salary (besides the crazy high cost of living sf / NY metro areas) but in 90% of the US outside tech hotspots entry level programming jobs are as low as half as much, especially in the Midwest.

FWIW, the Boston area is also ~$100K for new college grads at a "tech matters to us" company (which makes somewhat less sense to post now that the parent comment has been edited...)

I know several programmers that are many times more productive than their peers, when compared to least-performing peers it's easily 10-20x. They make a little bit more, I'd guess 20-30%.

Not in the US, but I'm sure this is quite common and compensation anywhere near reflecting the performance is a rare exception.

>I know several programmers that are many times more productive than their peers, when compared to least-performing peers it's easily 10-20x. They make a little bit more, I'd guess 20-30%.

I'm not saying the system is perfect at identifying who's the 10x engineer and who's the bum. But once identified there is definitely a gap in pay roughly equivalent to the difference in production.

Which system is identifying the 10x engineer? What generates that gap in pay? It sorts of sounds like you are trying to fit reality into a model and not vice versa.

>Which system is identifying the 10x engineer?

The compensation scheme at companies that employ them.

>What generates that gap in pay?

All companies are different but it's typical a difference in grade or rank.

Sorry for a late reply. In most companies outside the US nobody, not even the CEO, makes 10x the income of an average low-performing engineer. A high performer has a chance of getting a respectable salary only by rising to CTO or similar roles, which obviously require skills other than just project contribution.

There is literally zero chance a high performer would get even 3x salary compared to their peers. Those pay ranks simply do not exist.

Totally agree. There are a few exceptions but for most people their pay is not much correlated with productivity.

To me, a 10x programmer is thought of in relation to their peers

If you have a good development stack that is properly tuned to your niche, a good portion of the work should be domain analysis, not raw coding. If your bottleneck is coding, your stack is probably wasteful, bloated, and/or buggy, creating unnecessary busy-work. Orgs often over-follow fads or grab trends from industries that don't match their own, rather than tune or clean their existing stack. Rewarding those fast at unnecessary busy-work usually just multiplies unnecessary busy-work.