[cracker_jacks]

People are overcomplicating this. It's simply because there is no market to create price discovery. Most of your price is established the day you start, well before you've proven yourself to be a '50x engineer'. And no one outside the org knows you're a '50x engineer', so there's no competition trying to hire you away. I am surprised the author of this article missed this despite making the analogy to sports athletes who have constant price discovery because their stats/accomplishments are public. It is in the company's advantage to prevent this price discovery and ideally not have a '50x engineer' be aware of how financially significant their contribution is, definitely not make competitors aware.

[knowtheworld]

I think it's also very hard to even just be proven to be a 50x engineer even within a company. And most companies don't know how to identify 50x engineers. And yes even if they can, they have totally no incentives to disclose this info to other companies to increase competition. But for the most part they don’t have to block this info because they don’t know it in the first place.

[ianlevesque]

> so there's no competition trying to hire you away

I agree with a lot of what you said but this part isn't true. I've been in conversations where people were bragging up that they were able to hire away Person X after >2 years of convincing. It definitely felt like know a guy who knows a guy though, not some open market.