Ladies and gentlemen, the problem with The Valley in 2025.

1000x revenue not 1000x developer productivity is possible sometimes. There are lots of jobs where developers also decide on the roadmap and requirements along with the execution instead of just being ticket monkey and a good idea executed well could easily be worth 1000x changing button colours and adding pagination to an API

impact != story points

Yeah, story points approximate effort, so it's fairly impossible to be 10x on those.

JIRA has a notion of business value points, and you could make up similar metrics in other project planning tools. The problem would then be how to estimate the value of implementing 0.01% of the technology of a product that doesn't sell as a standalone feature. If you can accurately do that, you might be the 100x employee already.

I agree, but my point is that 1000x is clearly hyperbole. Certainly there are people who are more productive or impactful, but not 1000 times more. That's particularly true since programming (like most human endeavors) is largely a team sport.

These companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to train these models and (hope to) make billions from them. The researchers are the people who know how to do it. These aren't guys cranking out React buttons.

They know how to train the models because they were part of a team that did it once at a competitor already. They bring with them very domain specific knowledge and experience. It's not something you can learn at college or hacking away in your spare time.

Fair enough, they're probably worth the money it takes to poach them. But trying to stretch the (arguably already tenous) "10x engineer" model to explain why is just ridiculous.

He would come up with an out of the box solution.

Like writing a code generator that automates tedious work.

i dont think its that far off.

suppose every team needs to do a similar 10 story points of maintenance, like a java major version update from 5 to 21.

if youve got 100 teams, thats about 1000 story points, and if an engineer automated that change, theyve still done 1000 story points overall, even if what they implemented was only 10 story points itself