The average engineer is about to become the most expensive hire on your team

The average engineer is about to become the most expensive hire on your team.

Great engineers with agents get enormous leverage. Their judgment about what to build, what to throw away, and what the agent got subtly wrong is where the value lives.

An average engineer paired with an agent will happily generate a thousand lines of plausible code built on a bad architectural decision they didn't have the instinct to catch. Your best engineer catches it in PR review and spends Tuesday afternoon writing a long comment explaining why the approach is wrong and what to do instead. That time is gone. They weren't building.

The average hire doesn't just cost you their salary. They cost you a meaningful slice of your strong engineers' productivity, and that slice is worth far more than whatever you saved on the cheaper hire.

A great engineer costs 1.5x-2x an average one but two great engineers produce vastly more value than one great engineer dragged into constant cleanup duty.

The logical end result is that you should raise the bar on who you hire, pay them well and give them the best tools.

But what are average engineers supposed to do now?

Being reliably competent used to be a perfectly good career.

I'm not sure it still is, and I don't think the industry has reckoned with what that means.