Speaking only for myself, I'm the one they ask when there's a problem no one else on the regular team can solve, and I don't have someone technical "above" me t

Speaking only for myself, I'm the one they ask when there's a problem no one else on the regular team can solve, and I don't have someone technical "above" me to ask for help. I can only collaborate with people and drive the investigation and communicate the results. So that's sort of the Solver/SRE role. I don't know how to calculate "force multiple" for that scenario because in the absence of me solving it, the teams would basically limp along without a solution without fully understanding the negative impact. I'm also the one that sets certain best practices in code repositories, and I've learned that identifying a best practice and assigning it to someone else to introduce doesn't work very well. At those times I have to dive into the code, restructure things, and then present, so that the other coders can actually refer to it as an example. This in addition to helping team members know what is in-bounds and out-of-bounds for their story, and helping with code reviews. This is roughly the "tech lead" role. This has some sort of force-multiplier impact just by doing things like guiding the metaphorical ships away from the metaphorical icebergs. Finally, there's the classic "architecture" role, where we identify tech paths for the org in general. Recognizing when a well-targeted effort can replace an inefficiency with something smoother. Like I had to take it upon myself to set up elasticsearch and kibana correctly, and structuring the code to report the correct dimensions. Or structuring how our graphql queries worked so they didn't pound our graphql server. Or placing an in-memory cache on one layer of servers (this basically saved our launch). That's also stuff where it's hard to calculate "force multiplier". So I dunno. I'm talking about an eng organization of 50-100 people, so maybe that's not big enough to be valid for your question. But the point is that while the role is necessary and is a "multiplier", it's difficult to calculate because it's not as simple as just being 5x or 10x faster than another developer for a well-defined task.