Spoken like an engineer who thinks engineers are undervalued, not like a project manager who understands that the 10x productive engineer is incredibly, incredibly rare, and that all businesses must ultimately seek to maximize their profits.<p>Seriously, I've never heard of a company paying a single engineer (that is working as an individual contributor, and not in a leadership role) 10 times the salary of a "typical" engineer. If we take the salary of a typical engineer as merely $60,000 (probably an underestimate in most regions) that would imply a $600,000 salary for a "rock star" programmer.