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Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

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

#31

Post by Poiesis »

ggruschow wrote: post #14

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…

I started responding to disagree with you, but now I'm not sure what you're saying so I'll just chime in with my views. :)

I actually think production based pay is refreshing. I've personally worked under this system (OK, so technically my wife did). It is really egalitarian. Unfortunately it is also very uneven, as production capabilities vary considerably and at times disappear complete (i.e, you're sick). Also, as you pointed out for software development it's pretty hard to find decent metrics that don't deteriorate when you optimize solely for them. In her field (medical transcription), it was more clear-cut with a payment per line and penalties for mistakes.

From the lazy, employee-based-safe perspective I can certainly agree that time-based compensation is attractive, but my sense of self worth would prefer being paid on performance. I'd certainly prefer to hire based on it.

Really the current system is probably roughly as good as you're going to get right now. There are all manner of intangible pluses and minuses to a particular person and a lot of places take this into account for compensation. It makes the process less transparent but it at least allows flexibility.

Just one example--I like to think that I'm helping out less experienced developers when I'm explaining some concept of business process or something. But I'm certainly not adding code then. And what of managers? Good managers are certainly valuable but their personal contribution is even less measurable than that of a developer.

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

#32

Post by lincolnq »

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…

I always upvote people who say "go read Peopleware". See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=986024 for more discussion about the book.

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

#33

Post by Periodic »

pyre wrote: post #23
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #6

From the comments: > I’d love to see some metrics on the average life expectancy of a line of code for different programmers. I know that some of my best code was written and has sat there with minimal changes ever since. Now that 's an interesting idea.

Not necessarily. There's plenty of horrible, horrible code that doesn't get changed because it currently works, and it would be too much of a hassle to try and de-tangle it. There's also really awesome code that gets replaced because the requirements have changed and it needs to do something completely different.

In fact, the particularly horrible code might not be replaced for a long time precisely because it is hard to understand but it works and changing it could cause problems elsewhere.

There are plenty of enterprise systems like this.

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

#34

Post by Tamerlin »

clueless123 wrote: post #20

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 s…

That's completely true.

Unfortunately, in the world of programming, most people get rewarded for putting in extra hours rather than for being good at their jobs.

My pointy-haired manager rejected a design that I developed for our current project because I think he didn't understand it... instead we went and cloned the existing bug-ridden, convoluted, user-hostile app, following its example at every opportunity, and leading to a HUGE increase in project scope... exactly what I had predicted and attempted to avoid.

In the end what should have been a six-week project for a good 4-person team turned into a 4-month crunch for a 10-person team saddled with several run-of-the-mill and a few genuinely incompetent members... and the worst of the incompetent ended up being the primary architect based on his ego and politics.

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

#35

Post by btilly »

smokinn wrote: post #21
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?

Dr. Greg Wilson (editor of the Beautiful Code book that spawned Beautiful Architecture later) is working on a new book that talks about exactly this kind of thing. http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog/archives/2910.html Basically, he says that professional understanding of software is still in the lore stage where we gossip about what works and doesn't rather than empirical studies based on evidence. About this specific nu…

I don't realize his "fact" for the simple reason that he is wrong.

For example I often quote a 10x figure and cite Peopleware as a source. They draw their data from measurements taken of hundreds of different programmers working at different companies in different languages in the mid 1980s. Which is a lot more solid than the punchcard study he cites which I have honestly never heard of.

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

#36

Post by dusklight »

I think 10x is really not the right number.

First off there are the net negative producing programmers, you can't say the good programmers are 10x the productivity of those guys, because that would make them 10x worse, which is incorrect.

Second off, I think the variation between programmers can be much bigger than 10x, easily 50x or more. Of course the 1x programmers really don't like this idea, because their egos cannot handle the concept of someone else being that much better than they are.

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

#37

Post by ballpark »

tdavis wrote: post #2

My proudest moments as a programmer are those where I manage to develop some functionality in a week or two that took another team of programmers months or years to do by using a novel approach or stitching together preexisting code. Every line of code I write is another I will have to maintain. Sooner or later it will be a burden. For this reason, I strive to write as few as possible. The programmers I respect most…

I feel best when I'm deleting other's code, and accomplishing the same thing with much less code.

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

#39

Post by jey »

rdouble wrote: post #16

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.…

Justin Frankel is the doubly rare combination of being extremely skilled at programming and being able to leverage those skills to make tons of money. Most uber-programmers aren't so rich.

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

#40

Post by n-named »

rdouble wrote: post #16

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.…

Nullsoft was bought by AOL in June 1999 for US$80 million. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winamp#Winamp_2

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