What Does Paying Engineers for Outcomes Mean?

CJ Hess says paying engineers for outcomes means rewarding output instead of hours, because hourly client work paid him less as his output got better and faster. He liked the ethos Alex Lieberman first posted on Twitter: reward engineers for their output as opposed to rewarding them for their time.

Fast forwarding two years, engineers can parallelize a ton of work and have much more output at a time with Sonnet 3.5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro. He took the bet on much higher output and a higher earning capacity from his skill set and a deeper lean into AI, though the upside might not have been obvious. He fell in love with the model. It is what the future of engineering looks like. When AI is solving the technical problems, companies are going to pay based on outcome and are not going to want to pay based on the time required to build something.

Shawn Wang points to a previous episode for the pay rule: 10X pays people by story points once both sides agree what the story points are. Some 10X engineers can make millions of dollars a year, and some others may not make as much because they are not as productive. Alex Lieberman treats AI as a leveraged bet on a person's intellect and work ethic, so earning capacity is going to vary more than ever before. The model is not for everyone. It is for the person who wants to go long themselves, who has a strong foundation in software engineering and keeps pushing to leverage the frontier, stretching time while the output stays high quality.