best solution is to stay a 1x developer then devote most of your energy to sidegigs and stock investing

yes. or better be a 10x for 4 hours a week. i feel like 10x is about flow not stress, so doing 10x might be easier than 1x ironically.

there is a disconnect about how companies mildly or jot so mildly “gaslight” employees into burning all of their energy on the job.

Its more cultural than profit-seeking. The profit seeker would want to maximise the effectiveness of the worker, by for example thinking hard about what work is worth doing.

The biggest waste i see is cancelled projects that could have easily been pre-cancelled. The next is features that are hardly used. Followed by technical debt and its impact on velocity.

Actually, the best strategy is in fact to stay a 1x performer at work, AND to stay a 1x performer in your investing life via set-and-forget index funds.

Minimize risk and time spent in efficient markets with millions of participants (the developer talent pool, the stock market). These places are treadmills.

Instead, spend your free time in inefficient markets by starting a business with the rest of the time you’ve now freed up.

Most B2C and B2B markets don’t have millions of competitors, and hence are much less efficient than the developer talent pool and stock market (which do).

This is the optimal strategy.

You’re not wrong, of course the company will pay the minimum it can get away with. My point was a bit broader regarding the market value between an executive versus a programmer.

If a company is doing its job correctly, a 10x engineer should not be leveled the same as a 1x engineer. (It's more complicated than that but, y'know.)

Yeah, but you have to go up quite a few levels to make 10x the pay. E.g., a Google L5 makes (ballpark) $360k. An L8 makes (ballpark) $1M. That's only 3x higher, and you probably need a lot more than 10x impact to go L5 -> L8. An L4 makes $270k, still within ~1/4 of an L8. L3s are paid almost 200k, which is still ~1/5 of an L8.

I don't know what L9s or 10s are paid; it's probably highly variable and the total number are probably a handful.

Advancement at Google is tied heavily to being on the right projects to the extent that I think you're way overselling the extent to which the higher levels will be better at their jobs.

That seems plausible; I don’t work there. I think that further supports the argument that “10x engineers” are not paid 10x.

if the company is doing its job correctly, its paying the 10x engineer even less than the 1x engineer.

if the engineer is doing their job correctly, they are negotiating to be paid more than tne 1x

> paying the 10x engineer even less than the 1x engineer

Why is that a good idea? Isn't there a risk that s/he will then quit?

that's one way to get a lot of 1x engineers...

Sad truth.