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by ianlevesque 1917 days ago
They kinda do though. This is how FAANG retains their best. It's not professional athlete level but there's a reason talent still goes there.
2 comments

That has less to do with the engineers themselves and much more to do with the benefit that those companies get from those engineers. Someone making minor UI changes at Google might provide a 5% increase in ad clicks in certain situations, which earns Google millions in additional revenue. Even though the bar for that kind of work may not be very high, most companies simply don’t get that much benefit from a single engineer, even a 50x-er.
It's rare for FAANG to pay over $1m total comp for an individual contributor unless you're a renowned superstar.

There's probably thousands of ICs at those companies who have delivered millions in recurring value, though. At Google scale, a single engineer could deliver 8 figures in value or more.

If you want to extract 50x you'll need to be a people manager. And in my experience, most 10x+ engineers are really bad at leading people. It's hard to be amazing at engineering and amazing at people management.