In the realm of software, there is a limited number of "better engineers" in a given region and in the entire world.
Paying more will have a zero-sum effect in the short term, simply attracting workers away from other software companies. In the longer term, it will encourage more newcomers to enter the field and spur the "less better" engineers to improve or update their skills.
I'm still not clear about what you meant by "better engineers"; I'm in doubt about the theory of the 10x engineer. If you meant engineers with updated skills, then I might agree with you.
> I'm still not clear about what you meant by "better engineers"; I'm in doubt about the theory of the 10x engineer. If you meant engineers with updated skills, then I might agree with you.
I simply meant more skilled engineers. (I'll readily admit that discerning which candidates are actually more skilled during an interview is a fairly challenging problem.) My personal opinion is that "10x" is a flat-out myth, and significant culture problem in our field. Engineering anything of moderate complexity requires >1 mind, and stockpiling all your knowledge into a single person — even if he or she is a great engineer — is foolhardy. I don't think that not believing that "10x" is a thing or a good idea means that there isn't a range of skill, however.
And perhaps the above is part of the problem. I've interacted with a number of engineers writing a lot of … crap … because they don't know what they're doing, and won't take the time to learn what they're doing¹. I spend an awful lot of my own time untangling the tech debt left by the "10x"ers that came before me. While I do get paid for it, I'd usually rather be doing something else. Yet, I don't really think I could reliably pick these people out in an interview, and simply interviewing is such an endurance task of wading through the seemingly endless masses of "engineers" that can't write a for loop that can't be singled out by tech recruiters who have no tech background b/c the recruiters can't recognize a BS résumé from a non-BS one (because they have no background in tech, but are really just LinkedIn scrapers AFAICT). Lastly, I don't know that SWE is a great field for get-rich-quick: I'm not paid all that competitively if you compare SWE in the Bay Area to say, investors, doctors, lawyers, …)
¹I once interacted with someone trying to send emails. Instead of using a library, he was rolling his own serializer for emails. But he also refused to read the RFC — despite repeated attempts to show him that it contained the information he needed, and testing it repeatedly broke it. (And this is but one example out of many. I'm currently working somewhere where we have multiple broken serializers that attempt to emit data for PostgreSQL, broken for the same reasons: refusal to understand the required output format prior to writing an emitter for it. "It's just CSV/TSV"
Paying more will have a zero-sum effect in the short term, simply attracting workers away from other software companies. In the longer term, it will encourage more newcomers to enter the field and spur the "less better" engineers to improve or update their skills.
I'm still not clear about what you meant by "better engineers"; I'm in doubt about the theory of the 10x engineer. If you meant engineers with updated skills, then I might agree with you.