Why are they hiring the candidate to begin with?

Because they feel they can extract more value from them then they are paying them.

There are no real boundaries of when work starts and stops or when your responsibilities end because the task is to increase business value and that is technically endless

I work 40 hours a week and they pay me the agreed upon amount. There was nowhere in our agreement the expectation of my working more than that. I also knew that they could put me on a plane anytime during the week.

The company keeps piling more and more work, keeps growing and growing,

That’s completely on the employee to communicate trade offs between time, cost and requirements. My time is fixed at 40 hours a week. They can choose to use my 40 hours a week to work with sales and the customer to close a deal, be a project manager, lead an implementation, be a hands on keyboard developer, or be a “cloud engineer”. It’s on them how to best use my talents for the amount of money they are paying me. But seeing that they pay my level of employee the highest of all of the ICs, they really should choose to have me working with sales and clients to close deals.

That’s not bragging. I make now what I made as a mid level employee at BigTech in 2021.

I keep hearing how 10x engineers make their companies millions upon millions but they only get paid a fraction of that. How does that even make sense as a fair exchange?

The concept of a 10x engineer except in very rare cases is a myth if you think of them as just being on a keyboard everyday. All of the things I listed I could do - project management, backend developer or a cloud engineer - I would say I’m only slightly better than average if that. My multiplier comes because i can work with all of those people and the “business” and they can put me on a plane or zoom call and I can be trusted to have the soft skills necessary and my breadth is wide enough to know what needs to be done as part of a complex implementation and how to derive business value.

If you are making a company millions of dollars and you are only getting a fraction of that - and I doubt someone is doing that on their own without the supporting organizational infrastructure - it’s on you to leverage that to meet your priority stack.

Not to mention is completely unfeasible for most people to have this kind of impact... it is only possible for those in key positions, yet every engineer is tasked with this same objective to increase company value as much as possible. There's just something very wrong with that.

If you are a junior developer, there isn’t much expected of you, you are told what to do and how to do it. You aren’t expected to know the business value.

If you are a mid level developer, you are generally told the business objective and expected to know best practices of how to get there and understand trade offs on the epic/work stream level.

If you are a “senior” developer, now you are expected to understand business value, work with the stakeholders or their proxy, understand risks, navigate XYProblems on the project implementation level and deal with ambiguity.

As you move up the more “scope”, “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity” you have to be comfortable with.

“Codez real gud” only comes into play in getting from junior to mid.