I wouldn’t be surprised to find out Carmack was paid 100x more than the average engineer once equity from the acquisition of his company is taken into account.

Does anyone know how much he made altogether from Meta?

The unfortunate reality of engineering is that we don't get paid proportional to the value we create, even the superstars. That's how tech companies make so much money, after all.

If you're climbing the exec ladder your pay will scale a little bit better, but again, not 100x or even 10x. Even the current AI researcher craze is for an extremely small number of people.

For some data points, check out levels.fyi and compare the ratio of TCs for a mid-level engineer/manager versus the topmost level (Distinguished SWE, VP etc.) for any given company.

The whole premise of YCombinator is that it’s easier to teach good engineers business than to teach good business people engineering skills.

And thus help engineers get paid more in line with their “value”. Albeit with much higher variance.

I would agree with that premise, but at that point they are not engineers, they are founders! I guess in the end, to capture their full value engineers must escape the bonds of regular employment.

Which is not to say either one is better or worse! Regular employment does come with much lower risk, as it is amortized over the entire company, whereas startups are risky and stressful. Different strokes for different folks.

I do think AI could create a new paradigm though. With dropping employment and increasing full-stack business capabilities, I foresee a rise in solopreneurship, something I'm trying out myself.

Ah, I was going to say it’s impossible to get 5x increase in productivity, because writing code takes up less than 20% of a developer’s time. But I can understand that kind of improvement on just the coding part.

The trick now is deciding what code to write quickly enough to keep Claude and friends busy.

I will say for example now at work.. if I see a broken window I have an AI fix it. This is a recent habit for me, so I can't say it will stick, but I'm fixing issues in many more adjacent code bases then I normally would.

It used to be "hey I found an issue..", now it is like "here is a pr to fix an issue I saw". The net effort to me is only slightly more. I usually have to identify the problem and that is like 90% of fixing it.

Add to the fact that now I can have an AI take a first pass at identifying the problem with probably an 80%+ success rate.

Why not just have the robots oversee the robots?

It’s first showing up in high unemployment for graduating college students.

Probably because dentists are more cash based and less battling with insurance for payments.

Customers are more price sensitive so the dentists have to be too.

Everything I’ve read about experiments where they’ve tried this have been massive failures. The AIs always get stuck and can’t make further progress at some point when given the full responsibilities of a human employee.

Evidently they want free buses and groceries. Which given the end of human employees, isn’t the worst priorities in the world.

Minor nit:

Machines to “take care of the elderly” is one of the worst possible uses of this technology. We desperately need more human interaction between the old and the young, not less.

But what happens when the people without jobs can’t buy food and starve to death?

Political change.

This is a political problem, not a technical one.

Looking at recent election results, what gives you that confidence?