There's another reason, too -- which is that a "50x engineer" will very rarely be 50x on most development tasks.
Your 50x engineer may be able to build a highly performant and complex algorithm by themselves, truly in a week where other engineers might take a year.
But 99% of programming isn't that. It's CRUD apps and configuration files and debugging browser quirks and hunting down race conditions etc.
Your "50x engineer" probably isn't going to be all that faster solving a CSS bug or putting together an online order form or configuring Apache.
So even if companies could identify programming geniuses... they mostly don't have genius-level work to give them, so there's no use in paying 50x anyways.
Your 50x engineer may be able to build a highly performant and complex algorithm by themselves, truly in a week where other engineers might take a year.
But 99% of programming isn't that. It's CRUD apps and configuration files and debugging browser quirks and hunting down race conditions etc.
Your "50x engineer" probably isn't going to be all that faster solving a CSS bug or putting together an online order form or configuring Apache.
So even if companies could identify programming geniuses... they mostly don't have genius-level work to give them, so there's no use in paying 50x anyways.