> It makes me wonder, if someone is so smart that they can do "10x" the work, would they not use that smartness to look at the meta of it all and wonder why they don't get 10x the rewards?
It is hard to understand other people with freakishly high intrinsic motivation. They look like aliens to the normies.
Maybe because they enjoy the work they do because they love programming and are very happy that they are getting paid well, relative to most professions, for their hobby? Sample size of 1 tho.
I feel the same when I read about a career staff engineer for NASA. They work on many cool projects, but the pay is average compared to the tech industry. When they talk about their work, you can see that they have very high intrinsic motivation.
