But is it?

Is it really 100x? Imagine that in 3 days you get the same amount of customers as you would in a almost a year so then in the next 3 days can you get the same and in the next 3 days again ... This is not even considering the idea that with AI you will get 100x of the previous 100x maybe which is really something pretty big.

If you have examples please share them.

I know good examples that are accelerating quite a lot with AI but not at the level of 100x.

That is in line with L6 comp at Netflix and similar companies pre-AI mania. So presumably companies do see 10x performance differences in staff and are willing to pay for it because they aren't charities. And I'd be using the heck out of LLMs if I was still working there, because they have proven their worth to me on open source FreeBSD work and I know the sentiment is shared by many other prolific src committers.

The main problem with LLM productivity improvement is most of us are basically treading water already as employees.. and we all tend to use new tools to keep up with the times. So everyone roughly leveling up over the same couple of years isn't going to net any pay increase, and the best you can do is job hop to somewhere that rewards you accordingly if you are able to demonstrate outstanding capabilities.

But most ironically, LLMs are also pretty terrible for current corporate structuring, because there were already massive turf wars and performative theatrics, and LLMs just make that easier/worse. So small teams and projects are really poised to benefit at the moment, because it will take a long time to figure out how to adapt organizations and management structures to this reality. I also have no idea how a large org would interview, a leetcode interview was always a bit of a performance and hazing ritual and seems completely absurd at this point.

Do they see such performance differences, or does the carrot need to be at least so big to tolerate the manufactured pressure and mismanagement at these companies? An engineer worth their salt doesn't have to work at a given company after all, and more often than not it's the golden handcuffs that are keeping them there as opposed to moseying on over to the company across the street. While underpayment is often seen as a sign of exploitation, large salaries can indicate such an environment too.

There's definitely a threshold of talent you need to cross to be eligible, but beyond that your differential impact is likely to be negligible at least at a company beyond a certain size.

At one point someone did, for instance the WhatsApp and Netflix OCA team being on order of 50 people while supporting xxx million users. As a company grows you are disincentivized from running a small operation like that if others aren't metered to the same rubric.