Comment by tedggh
3 hours ago
If a SWE could truly output 20x their effort, that person would probably be better at freelancing or teaming up with another SWE. If something can be automated away to AI is Project Management. Also, there has to be a point where delivering more and faster code doesn’t matter, because the choke points are somewhere else in the Project Life Cycle, say waiting for legal, other vendors, budgets, suppliers, etc, so productivity could max out at say 3X, after which, unless you have a strong pipeline of work, your engineers will be sitting around waiting for the next phase of the project to start.
> If a SWE could truly output 20x their effort, that person would probably be better at freelancing or teaming up with another SWE.
Yes but this requires the willingness to take on the additional stress and risk of managing your own sales, marketing, accounting, etc.