[jt2190]

> ... if so many employers are looking for 10x engineers and some are willing to pay them 5x or even more...

Now we’re no longer talking about productivity but about value. Why a company decides to pay well above the average for an individual is going to depend on a lot of things, starting with whether they can even afford to pay this much.

Edit: Making these pay levels all about productivity, in yourself or others, ignores a lot of other avenues that can increase your value.

[oferka]

Agree. productivity as in "works faster" is not something that justifies being treated (and payed) as 10x engineer. Evaluating "value" of an engineer is also a topic of itself. At the end of the day, this is a team sport. even when a certain project is super successful (and in some cases it might take few month to see business impact) it's not always easy to know how much each individual in the team contributed to this success. BTW - same is true for failure.