> I don't think I've ever met an engineer who is, by themselves, 1000x more productive than even the least productive person I've ever worked with
I guess that all comes down to how you measure it. I've worked with people who screw up the code base, suck time and productivity away from other team members, and require frequent management attention. So their productivity is negative or zero. Which makes me infinitely more productive than them.
I demand infinity dollars!
Just kidding of course, but the point is people aren't and can't be paid exactly mathematically proportionally to their productivity. About the best we can expect is for pay to be correlated with productivity. Or maybe monotonically increasing with productivity?
Yes you can easily make a lot of claims. But I don't think they stack up, hence my request to "prove" it.
Also, of course, if you compare me (L5 Swe) and Jeff (L11 senior Google fellow/SVP) or Sanjay, you'll find that the roles we are hired into have vastly different compensation ranges. So even presuming this is true, it actually goes against your overall point that wide ranges for a single posting are justified. I'm not being hired for the same work as Sanjay.
> Even though you are an L5, you'll never design an Android or a Spanner or a Dremel system or a Self-Driving System from scratch.
Correct, but neither Jeff nor Sanjay did any of those things, and no one did any of those things alone, or from scratch.
> SWEs who create Spanner Databases are 1000x more valuable to companies than someone who adds tiny features using a well-defined process and framework.
IDK, I'm pretty sure there's an automated tool that can create a spanner database for me, so I'm not sure why you think that's that impressive. Less snarkily, you're underestimating the amount of collaboration that happens, even with the impressive engineers. Tellingly, it's never the people extolled as 10 or 100x engineers who claim to be such, usually they echo my sentiments!
MapReduce is neither Spanner nor Dremel nor Android nor a Self-Driving system. I'm not sure what your point is.
And the paper you cite notes a number of other people in the acknowledgements who were critical both to refining the design, and to the infrastructure that MR was built atop, so even in the case of something that Jeff and Sanjay did do, they neither did it "alone", nor "from scratch", despite yes, being the two primary designers and developers of the initial implementation of MR.
If you have a point you're trying to make, make it explicitly.
I guess that all comes down to how you measure it. I've worked with people who screw up the code base, suck time and productivity away from other team members, and require frequent management attention. So their productivity is negative or zero. Which makes me infinitely more productive than them.
I demand infinity dollars!
Just kidding of course, but the point is people aren't and can't be paid exactly mathematically proportionally to their productivity. About the best we can expect is for pay to be correlated with productivity. Or maybe monotonically increasing with productivity?