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Pricing Programmers

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Re: Pricing Programmers

#91

Post by timeout »

spoiler wrote: post #89
lemevi wrote: post #10

For years, from one job in the bay area to the next I worked on products that never made any money and ended up being canceled. Even when I worked on a project that ended up making money I spent a year working on a version that was rebooted from scratch before customers ever saw it. At a couple of startups that never took of afterward I could clearly see the impact that code I wrote was making on sales and value. It…

It's nice to see someone have such a nice experience with their employment history. I actually have the opposite experience. tldr: I am happy you had such good luck; mine sucked. Worked in Tech Support (for a tech-related company), made tools to make mine and colleagues' from the department job easier and faster. This caught some attention from the infrastructure department, which got me "promoted" to junior sys admi…

Leave. Life's too short.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#92

Post by emerongi »

timeout wrote: post #91
spoiler wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice to see someone have such a nice experience with their employment history. I actually have the opposite experience. tldr: I am happy you had such good luck; mine sucked. Worked in Tech Support (for a tech-related company), made tools to make mine and colleagues' from the department job easier and faster. This caught some attention from the infrastructure department, which got me "promoted" to junior sys admi…

Leave. Life's too short.

Or sell yourself to the manager. "This is what I did (proof that you're valuable) - if you assign me to this new thing (and pay me more, since it's harder), I'm going to create 2x the value that I'm creating right now."

If it doesn't work, leave.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#93

Post by walshemj »

Hytosys wrote: post #55

>If I create $1M of value for the company, you can compare my price with $1M. Incorrect. If your company were to pay you the same amount as they profit off of you, you wouldn't be sticking around for very long at that company. That's the basic requirement of your company's mode of production. >If the ranges of acceptable don’t overlap, it’s worth stepping back and clarifying what glasses people are using to look at t…

And value created is lumpy. I found a bug in 20 mins in one major job site in the uk that was costing them £1/2 mill a week.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#94

Post by eswat »

oskrim wrote: post #17
Alex3917 wrote: post #2

Programmers are worth $0 because programming isn't a job. It's not even a skill; rather, it's more of an active literacy. Asking how much you should pay a programmer is like asking how much you should pay a telephone user, or how much you should pay a pencil user.

Come on, don't feed the troll

I guess you can look at the comment as trolling. But look past that and it is an interesting idea that’s worth thinking about.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#95

Post by Joeri »

spoiler wrote: post #89
lemevi wrote: post #10

For years, from one job in the bay area to the next I worked on products that never made any money and ended up being canceled. Even when I worked on a project that ended up making money I spent a year working on a version that was rebooted from scratch before customers ever saw it. At a couple of startups that never took of afterward I could clearly see the impact that code I wrote was making on sales and value. It…

It's nice to see someone have such a nice experience with their employment history. I actually have the opposite experience. tldr: I am happy you had such good luck; mine sucked. Worked in Tech Support (for a tech-related company), made tools to make mine and colleagues' from the department job easier and faster. This caught some attention from the infrastructure department, which got me "promoted" to junior sys admi…

If you can't leave, you have no leverage and rely on the benevolence of others (a trait which is exceedingly rare). I've been in the situation where I went from being the junior hire to the team lead, with only minor pay adjustments. All it took to fix that was to point out (nicely) that I expected to be paid what I was worth, and they had the choice to do so or to risk me walking out. Line up an alternative, then leverage that into a better situation. If you have no alternative, you're not underpaid, regardless of fairness.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#96

Post by Joeri »

fsloth wrote: post #60
sl8r wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Care to name some, besides banking and consulting, and possibly corporate law? I'd suggest that in most fields, you don't make significantly more money until you're managing a significant percentage of people, or tasked with making decisions that set the direction the company. This is fair / you're right: I was mainly thinking of banking, consulting, law, and buy-side finance. As you say, though, there are plenty o…

"whether there is something intrinsically non-value-capturing going on" If you mean that it's hard to apply value to an individuals labour in programming you are correct, except in some rare circumstances where there is only one guy at work - then it becomes trivial. Let's look this from the point of view of features and fixes for an individual software product. For a car mechanic, an unserved issue means the single…

> Software is nothing like building a house except in rare circumstances. Real world construction projects are mostly about creating linear combinations of known things.

Have you actually built a house before? The plans never quite match up to the reality. It always takes longer than you think, and costs more. No house is exactly the same as another. Every house has bespoke parts to it. Shoddy construction happens often, and fixing the issues that result can cost more than initial construction. And then the customer changes their mind, causing costly rework that never quite fits properly into the initial design. I would say building software is very much like building a house.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#97

Post by bobcostas55 »

fengwick3 wrote: post #59
Hytosys wrote: post #55

>If I create $1M of value for the company, you can compare my price with $1M. Incorrect. If your company were to pay you the same amount as they profit off of you, you wouldn't be sticking around for very long at that company. That's the basic requirement of your company's mode of production. >If the ranges of acceptable don’t overlap, it’s worth stepping back and clarifying what glasses people are using to look at t…

> Incorrect. If your company were to pay you the same amount as they profit off of you, you wouldn't be sticking around for very long at that company. That's the basic requirement of your company's mode of production. Why is this a basic requirement? Assuming by "amount they profit off" an employee, you refer to the economic profit (that is to say the profit after taking into account of all economic costs, including…

>but for the average programmer it's pretty close (skills are quite homogeneous

I don't think that's right. First of all, programming skills are not homogeneous at all, they are in fact widely dispersed. A bad programmer can very easily destroy value by slowing down his team, in a way that doesn't happen in e.g. a factory environment. It's also not easy to judge programmer skill pre-hiring, so starting salaries are biased toward the mean, making good programmers underpaid and bad programmers overpaid.

Additionally, there are biases, morale considerations, and cultural issues that prevent compensation being equal to value added. Businesses are incredibly averse to firing people (there are some good reasons for this of course, e.g. morale). There is also very strong inequity aversion (again partially a morale issue) that makes it impossible to pay top programmers what they're really worth. Both of these issues lead to significant deviations.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#98

Post by ownagefool »

lemevi wrote: post #10

For years, from one job in the bay area to the next I worked on products that never made any money and ended up being canceled. Even when I worked on a project that ended up making money I spent a year working on a version that was rebooted from scratch before customers ever saw it. At a couple of startups that never took of afterward I could clearly see the impact that code I wrote was making on sales and value. It…

It's a whole pile of depends. Particularly in your case it depends on what you love about programming.

The guy who rocks into a company, tells them they need to write everything in new-buzzword-framework and use bucket-with-holes-in-it-db is arguably creating negative value and if the world was fair, they'd be paying for the privilege to be there.

On the other hand, the guy who comes in and tries to deliver the product, makes resonably, albeit slightly boring, choices and focuses on creating the thing people want, but the product fails because of poor market fit, deserves to get paid. It's not their fault if business people haven't done their jobs.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#99

Post by devonkim »

douche wrote: post #86
uptownfunk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting, I would be more bold and call these problems instead of features, as I think programmers deserve better. (Then again I may be biased!) Problem 1 is more systemic and harder to solve. For Problem 2 I feel there may be a way to strategize around it. Specifically, wondering if there is a point where salaries increase, and then after a certain point, rate of salary increase drops off at which point i…

I'd be very hesitant to push a system that gave significant bonuses to salary increases based on going out and getting an additional degree. A.) Does the material in the additional education in any way contribute to making you better/more efficient/whatever at your job? B.) The risk of bullshit diploma mills goes up again. I have family in education, and many districts have incentive programs for teachers to get Mast…

This is very much a requirement for promotion in federal service. I've joked I'd get paid less than my wife whom holds a masters in government when I currently make 5x what she does and I'm currently underpaid.

Re: Pricing Programmers

#100

Post by sokoloff »

ownagefool wrote: post #98
lemevi wrote: post #10

For years, from one job in the bay area to the next I worked on products that never made any money and ended up being canceled. Even when I worked on a project that ended up making money I spent a year working on a version that was rebooted from scratch before customers ever saw it. At a couple of startups that never took of afterward I could clearly see the impact that code I wrote was making on sales and value. It…

It's a whole pile of depends. Particularly in your case it depends on what you love about programming. The guy who rocks into a company, tells them they need to write everything in new-buzzword-framework and use bucket-with-holes-in-it-db is arguably creating negative value and if the world was fair, they'd be paying for the privilege to be there. On the other hand, the guy who comes in and tries to deliver the produ…

I'm totally stealing bucket-with-holes-in-it-db...
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