Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

johndcook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 133 posts

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

#11

Post by gruseom »

DarkShikari wrote: post #7
kingkongreveng_ wrote: post #5

> The most productive programmers orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers This is often repeated, never meaningfully demonstrated. I doubt it is true if we are excluding unqualified programmers.

Always remember the classic story about "where to put the X"... Have you ever heard of Charlie Steinmetz? Legend has it that he was a prominent electrical engineer in the early twentieth century. Not long after his retirement, all of the engineers at General Electric had a problem. Although each was wise, they were unable to understand the complexity of the machinery. A call was made and Charlie Steinmetz came to the…

It's a legend that's often told about Tesla as well:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=183998

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp

There's a really similar story about Picasso asked by a lady in a restaurant to draw a simple sketch on a napkin. He does and hands it to her saying, "That will be [X] thousand dollars". Shocked, she says: "But that only took you 30 seconds!" "Madam", says Picasso, "It took me thirty years."

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

#12

Post by ericb »

Honest questionn--did the productivity study where the oft-quoted 10x number comes from count lines of code as the productivity measure? If so, lines of code avoided would move a developer into the "less productive" bucket. Anyone have a link to a source for this number?

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

#13

Post by Zev »

ericb wrote: post #12

Honest questionn--did the productivity study where the oft-quoted 10x number comes from count lines of code as the productivity measure? If so, lines of code avoided would move a developer into the "less productive" bucket. Anyone have a link to a source for this number?

The number is from The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks, based on his experiences when developing IBM's OS/360.

Beyond that, I can't really answer the rest of your questions; I haven't managed to sit down and read it yet.

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

#14

Post by ggruschow »

Productivity based compensation for thought-workers isn't a panacea. Expenses based on time, income habituation, success or blame attribution, and differences of opinion on what is productive can actually make it a pretty horrible experience -- even for people who are well above the average.

Time-based compensation and productivity-based firing can be a pretty good system for a lot of people in a lot of situations.

I was hiring for some other jobs recently, and I was surprised at how the group I was hiring from thought about their compensation. It wasn't "I deserve $X", "Chris makes $Y", or even "I think I can get them to pay $Z." They'd come to me and say "I need a job that pays $A/month because [$A ~= monthly expenses + a little extra niceties + a safety cushion in case something bad happens]". It was refreshing.

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

#15

Post by samuel »

raganwald wrote: post #4

Show me how to measure productivity and I'll find a way for the 10x more productive programmer to earn 10x the compensation. I agree with the OP that the problem here is that it is not easy to measure productivity. http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-02-1...

It's worse than that. There is a standard way of assesing programmers productivity and is the worst it could be: kLOC's.

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

#16

Post by rdouble »

The author has not ever worked with the truly 10x more productive programmers. Most people do not get the chance to work with these programmers. They do get paid in proportion to their productivity. There are so many horrible programmers that you can be mediocre and be 10x more productive than the guy next to you. Thus you think you're in the 10x crew. But you really aren't. It's not because you're really that good. It's because the guy next to you is really that bad.

I thought I was pretty good until I worked with the guy who made Winamp. It took me a couple weeks to make some enhancements to their add-ons site. It took him a couple weeks to write his own version of Pro Tools. I made 80 thousand dollars. He made 80 million dollars.

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

#17

Post by kingkongreveng_ »

btilly wrote: post #8
kingkongreveng_ wrote: post #5

> The most productive programmers orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers This is often repeated, never meaningfully demonstrated. I doubt it is true if we are excluding unqualified programmers.

Never meaningfully demonstrated? Have you tried to verify the claim? Go read Peopleware . You will find described very carefully set up coding comparisons that routinely found a factor of 10 productivity difference between different experienced programmers on the same task, and also a discussion of what organizational factors lead to those productivity differences. There is other research on the topic as well. For in…

Well, I just googled the peopleware citation and it seems the study backing this often repeated claim is from the 1960s and people have plenty of questions about its methodology.

I'll easily buy 2X or 3X productivity difference. I'm not buying these casually tossed off claims about 10X or 30X productivity differences without the supporting research discussed in detail front and center. Unacknowledged differences of that magnitude would imply a massive arbitrage opportunity that has persisted for many years. And that's just not realistic.

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

#18

Post by raganwald »

samuel wrote: post #15
raganwald wrote: post #4

Show me how to measure productivity and I'll find a way for the 10x more productive programmer to earn 10x the compensation. I agree with the OP that the problem here is that it is not easy to measure productivity. http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-02-1...

It's worse than that. There is a standard way of assesing programmers productivity and is the worst it could be: kLOC's.

> Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

--Bill Gates.

My favourite consequence of measuring productivity by the line is to ask how much I owe my employer when I spend a day eliminating redundancy and thus contribute negative lines of code.

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

#19

Post by [deleted] »

icey wrote: post #9
kingkongreveng_ wrote: post #5

> The most productive programmers orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers This is often repeated, never meaningfully demonstrated. I doubt it is true if we are excluding unqualified programmers.

I think that part of the problem is unqualified programmers are part of the equation. The amount of "developers" out there who have no idea what they're doing is shocking. The dot-com implosion helped cut some of the excess weight, but there are still a lot of people working in software who have no excuse being there.

[deleted]

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

#20

Post by clueless123 »

It is because true productivity is very hard to identify, specially when you factor in quality, mainteinability, efficiency and timeliness. That is why managers should be as qualified as the people they manage.

Programmers do some thinking & some typing, the more you do of one, the less you do of the other. (don't remember the original author)

The lazy engineer is the best engineer.. If not for lazy people we would still be living in caves

Post reply on HN