I should also add as a +1: if you’re in engineering (and I suppose this extends to many other job roles but I’ll speak for eng for now), the difference between say an intermediate and a senior is not completely a factor of contribution, but also of experience.
A less experienced engineer might push an impressive amount of code, but a more experienced and senior engineer will get to the correct solution much more quickly, and more often the first time. Over a longer time scale this will become clear as a senior engineer’s API spec stands the test of time (less versioning) or their architecture doesn’t require a rewrite or their data model can be extended without downtime-inducing migrations.
I’m saying this as a self-taught engineer since 8 years old who consistently closed more tickets than my peers. For a long time I wondered why I was less senior or paid less than them, and as I became more senior myself it became clear that seniority was more a factor of how often my instinctual decisions were the correct call, because I had solved that problem before, and less because of my raw delivery.
