Salaried employees aren't paid for their time, they're paid for a combination of their output and their availability. Availability used to be strongly coupled with time but technology has introduced some flexibility there.

I don't think this is the reality. It is part of it, but people get paid different salaries, why? Some are more productive than others. Aside from leadership's (and society's) biased ability to determine value, these people theoretically get more because they contribute more.

They are paid for what they collectively output. The only reason that people seem to be paid by their time is that it's hard to measure each one's output individually and granularly.

is this not backwards? salaried employee means you get paid the same amount no matter how many hours you work.

I think it’s the other way around. Hourly wages are paid directly for time at work

The reality is huge swathes of the middle of large organisations are paid to take the blame for the layer above them. AI wont solve that.

At my most recent role we were definitely being judged by output metrics (both jira tickets completed and github prs merged). They showed us the jellyfish tool they used to check those metrics. Well, some of it. Regular ICs themselves didn't have that access.

When you work for a startup, or a zero-to-one project, it's hard to say you're even paid for your output. You're paid for probabilistic/expected future value output.

Yes but you are missing the point: our time can now make the company way more money. Can’t we demand a piece of this?