I am also a salaried employee and if I can save a minute of work time that’s one less minute I have to work.
I have a body of work I need to complete and sometimes that takes me 40 hours and sometimes much more.
The only way I can think of that $20 per month for increased productivity doesn’t help is if your company’s metric of success is being present/working 8 hours per day.
This is why productivity improvements feel so meh. For people that are hyper competitive and ambitious, it's a way to tackle more and bigger challenges. Fine.
For others though, the benefits do not really materialize in meaningful ways. Maybe you can win some slack/recovery time, but it's not really truly free time. You're still working and on call.
In fact, in quite a lot of teams being productive is actively punished. Say that in agile you do a great sprint, and execute 10 story points instead of the normal 5.
Nice. Oh...so you can do 10? 10 it is then for all the future sprints. Without a pay increase, obviously.
I agree that hyper competitive and ambitious people might do this. I would add though that curious and passionate people will also do this.
I'll be honest... if I weren't getting paid to be a software engineer I'd do it for free. Like I did when I was 13 years old with my 300 bps modem creating a BBS program.
This leads me to do all kinds of crazy things like work 6 hours on a Saturday because I am quite simply fascinated about the level of engineering I can do to turn an 18 hour batch process into 4.
It's been extremely lucrative for my career. I'm fortunate to work somewhere that is truly pay for performance. But not in a million years is that why I do it.
You've just described most office jobs.