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.

To add to this, I remember somebody here on HN pointing out a few months ago that they’ve never seen so much investment in businesses that are going “we don’t actually know what the billion dollar application is so we’re going to sell y’all some rough tools and bank on the rest of you figuring it out for us.”

> There’s gonna be one guy in charge of you, and he’s going to expect you to be putting out 20x output while thanking him for the privilege of being employed, assuming all goes the way every management team seems to want

A perfect summation.

But that's really not the point of this particular article.

The point being made is, do you know what financial impact your work is having in terms of increasing revenues or decreasing costs?

If the company revenue is going down and costs increasing, developers will be laid off regardless of how many tickets they close.