[msdos]

That you have no idea how much revenue is attributable to you as an individual doesn't mean revenue in general can't be measured and attributed.

Hypothetical example. Your employer has 1 billion users. You create compression that cuts down storage costs by 4%. Run the math and you see how much you saved.

If you saved $0.01 per user, you saved $10m. If the average salary is 100K and you saved $10m, you performed at 100x.

I agree the potential for "X" performance is hard to spot or measure when one isn't in proximity to big problems.

[twright0]

Except no matter what, no engineer functions in a vacuum. In your compression hypothetical, how do you measure the contribution of the engineers who did the code reviews? Who maintain the build environment and test suite that let the "100X" engineer quickly and confidently develop? Who wrote the initial code such that it was possible to add this compression after the fact at all? Who spend their time fixing bugs so the "100X" engineer had bandwidth for this compression project at all? Without those people, the "100X" engineer would have taken longer and made more mistakes, or never even attempted it at all. So it seems unreasonable (and even potentially demoralizing to the rest of the eng team) to call that one engineer a "100X engineer".

Things are accomplished by teams, not individuals.

[hiram112]

That's true, but what about the sales guy that takes 5% of a $10 million deal as commission? Or the exec team that gets a 10% cut of the increased profits this year?

There was always a huge amount of players at work helping the upper execs and sales teams, from the devs to HR.

I guess OP's post was and the article itself are noting that working your ass off and making a big contribution in SV as an engineer can sometimes be a bad deal, especially when the engineer in question really is talented.

[msdos]

Smaller hypothetical example. The Apple I wasn't designed and hand-built by a team.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I

[angersock]

I do not think it is crazy that that work could all be done by the same engineer, testing and building and debugging and all.

With a small experienced team and proper division of lager into vertical slices, that can be done.

[prostoalex]

You created a brand new compression algorithm that saved the proverbial 4% or applied an existing compression technology that proved to be more efficient for that specific use-case? In the former the employee is obviously 100x (and earned some juicy pied piper patents as a bonus), in the second case the company knew of an existing problem and needed someone, anyone, to take a look at it and optimize it.