I don't consider myself a 2x engineer; my company tells me that by not paying me 2x vs my colleagues, even if I know (and others believe that too) I deliver more than 2x their output.
Using AI will change nothing in this context.
Using AI will change nothing in this context.
This has never been the case in any company I've ever worked at. Even if you can finish your day's work in, say, 4 hours, you can't just dip out for the other 4 hours of the day.
Managers and teammates expect you to be available at the drop of a hat for meetings, incidents, random questions, "emergencies", etc.
Most jobs I've worked at eventually devolve into something like "Well, I've finished what I wanted to finish today. I could either stare at my monitor for the rest of the day waiting for something to happen, or I could go find some other work to do. Guess I'll go find some other work to do since that's slightly less miserable".
You also have to delicately "hide" the fact that you can finish your work significantly faster than expected. Otherwise the expectations of you change and you just get assigned more work to do.
Literally unwinnable scenarios. Only way to succeed is to just sit your ass in the chair. Almost no manager actually cares about your actual output - they all care about presentation and appearances.
Uh, no?
I had a task to do a semi-complex UI addition, the whole week was allocated for that.
I sicked the corp approved Github Copilot with 4o and Claude 3.7 at it and it was done in an afternoon. It's ~95% functionally complete, but ugly as sin. (The model didn't understand our specific Tailwind classes)
Now I can spend the rest of the week on polish.
So always aim for outcomes, not output :)
At my company, we did promote people quickly enough that they are now close to double their salaries when they started a year or so ago, due to their added value as engineers in the team. It gets tougher as they get into senior roles, but even there, there's quite a bit of room for differentiation.
Additionally, since this is a market, you should not even expect to be paid twice for 2x value provided — then it makes no difference to a company if they get two 1x engineers instead, and you are really not that special if you are double the cost. So really, the "fair" value is somewhere in between: 1.5x to equally reward both parties, or leaning one way or the other :)
You can certainly be very productive by doing what you are told. I'd probably fail at that metric against many engineers, yet people usually found me very valuable to their teams (I never asked if it was 1x or 2x or 0.5x compared to whatever they perceive as average).
The last few years, I am focused on empowering engineers to be equal partners in deciding what is being done, by teaching them to look for and suggest options which are 10% of the effort and 90% of the value for the user (or 20/80, and sometimes even 1% effort for 300% the value). Because they can best see what is simple and easy to do with the codebase, so if they put customer hat on, they unlock huge wins for their team and business.
The thing is that company is hunting for better value, and you are looking for a better deal.
If company can get 2x engineers' production at lower cost, you are only more valuable than having 2 engineers producing as much if you are cheaper. Your added value is this extra 1x production, but if you are selling "that" at the same price, they are just as well off by hiring two engineers instead of you: there is no benefit to having you over them.
If you can do it cheaper, then you are more valuable the cheaper you are. Which is why I said 1.5x cost is splitting the value/cost between you and the employer.