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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

#121

Post by Retric »

raganwald wrote: post #64
jey wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he's saying you have to take it upon yourself to turn "potential income" into "realized income".

I understand that an economist would say that exchanging intellectual property for money is the only way to measure productivity. It satisfies me about as much as measuring productivity by lines of code, and for much the same reason. Is an architecture astronaut really more productive than a programmer just because there is some sort of perceived value within an "Enterprise Environment?" Is a programmer who switches…

That's not actually true, economists are willing to measure things in non monetary terms because economists study people not money. EX: If you turn down job X that pays 20% more than job Y then clearly you are getting something of value out of that choice.

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

#122

Post by nikolayav »

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.

It clicks with my intuition.

In one particular area of programming, competitive programming, productivity is easier to measure.

One might call Tomek Czaijka the Federer of algorithmic competitions. As of 1.5 yrs ago, he had made more than $130k off of TopCoder competitions [1]. Seeing as how he is still ranked 3rd, this figure might be outdated [2].

I can assure you the average TopCoder contestant who has competed over a comparable amount of time made way less than $130k/30 ~ $4300. Easily more than 30 times the productivity.

You can argue about how coding up toy programs compares to working on products. I suspect there is a strong correlation though.

As a point of reference, please consider Steve Newman, who co-wrote Writely which was subsequently acquired by Google and is today the word processor of Google Docs [3]. He must have made some money in the process and was also successful at topcoder.com [4].

That being said, I do knew similar people with astonishingly low "product" productivity.

1. http://www.portfolio.com/careers/job-of-the-week/2008/07/06/...

2. http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=14440...

3. http://www.seattlepi.com/business/262443_googlewritely10.htm...

4. http://www.topcoder.com/tc?module=SimpleStats&c=coder_ac...

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

#123

Post by maigret »

DenisM wrote: post #45
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...

Start your own business (even if only a consultancy) and look at your bank account each day. That's the raw, true measure of productivity.

That reminds me that interesting graph http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/05/14/congratulations-google-s... about revenues per employee in big tech comp. See the differences... Interesting enough, when you dig down subpart of the companies, you find areas with very different revenue per head also.

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

#124

Post by sfk »

n-named wrote: post #40
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

Interesting information. This was the time when the bubble was expanding rapidly. Anything got sold for $80 million in those days.

I'm sure that Frankel is an excellent programmer, but this in no way an example that excellent programmers are generally rewarded according to their ability.

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

#125

Post by abdulhaq »

tigerthink wrote: post #89

I'm young enough that I can still change my career easily, and I often worry that I'm not one of the super productive programmers, and that I'm wasting my time and that I should choosing a different career. Is uber-productivity significantly enhanced by choosing the right development methodology (e.g. test-driven development) or is it mostly something innate? Aside from stories like rdouble's (which I don't find that…

I can see two sides of this here:

Negative: you're considering changing career, seems like you don't really love hacking. It's really hard to be a great hacker if you don't love it.

Positive: You want to learn. A key ingredient to becoming a great hacker is being keen to learn new techniques, practise them, and admitting that there are better ways to do it than the way you are doing it now.

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

#127

Post by sorbits »

jxcole wrote: post #79
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.…

It might be true that you are only 10 times better than the guy sitting next to you because he is 10 times worse than you, but this is something of a red herring. There are plenty of terrible programmers out there who are 10 times worse than me. Do I get paid 10x more than them? Not even close. This article is more about why a 10x productivity increase does not equate to a 10x pay increase than it is about the possib…

Try time the clerks in your local supermarket, I am sure you can find one which is twice as fast as the slowest, should he or she get twice the salary?

When it comes to programming there are relatively many bad programmers hired (on a base salary). Maybe the good programmers are underpaid, but definitely the bad programmers are overpaid.

Anecdotal evidence also suggests that programmers are generally bad at negotiating their own salary.

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

#128

Post by motters »

hvasishth wrote: post #59
DougBTX wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd disagree with your description of "super-productive", that sounds like normal-productive with time to fool around. Do something productive with the extra time (either more coding or, better, something else business related like running the finished app past someone who might have to use it) and there might be a chance of hitting "super-productive". (fast + time wasted = normal speed)

While I agree with fast + time wasted = normal speed, in reality it is not the wasted time that plays the role. In most companies developers don't have a fixed 8 hour job and most of them work more than 8 hours a day on a routine basis. I have seen managers who valued the total time spent working more than the actual work accomplished. So a developer who works about 8 hours a day was ranked below someone who spent 10…

It's often hard for a manager to judge how productive a developer is being. Often they're insufficiently qualified to judge the standard of the code being produced or whether one solution is more elegant/reusable than another, and instead are just using heuristics which work for other types of employment, such as estimating how much overall time and effort was put in.

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

#129

Post by Deestan »

tigerthink wrote: post #89

I'm young enough that I can still change my career easily, and I often worry that I'm not one of the super productive programmers, and that I'm wasting my time and that I should choosing a different career. Is uber-productivity significantly enhanced by choosing the right development methodology (e.g. test-driven development) or is it mostly something innate? Aside from stories like rdouble's (which I don't find that…

> Is uber-productivity significantly enhanced by choosing the right development methodology (e.g. test-driven development)?

Yeees...-ish. All methodologies have their pros and cons. Therefore you should be experienced in as many of them as possible, so you know when and where they are best used.

People who only know one methodology really well tend to overdo it - they don't know when to stop shoving tests and patterns into their codebase.

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

#130

Post by [deleted] »

nostrademons wrote: post #108
joe_the_user wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I remember using Gnutella back in the day. It was horribly buggy and slow. Maybe Frankel didn't write that one or maybe being satisfying things half-working was the secret to x100 productivity.

I used Gnutella too. It was horribly buggy and slow. However, remember that they wrote it in a weekend , and what it was attempting to do really was pretty revolutionary. Even brilliant programmers can only accomplish so much in a weekend.

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