181–190 of 449 posts
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The 10x thing happens all the time. What should happen is that a way for he 10x person to teach or otherwise influence the other members of the team should be in play, but constructing a robust set of incentives for that is difficult.
Interesting article here: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/flowers/ He talks about how you can allocate engineering effort to making other engineers more productive, among other subjects.
The only thing I like better than teaching is being taught. But both have a quantum of pain.
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Switzerland does have higher average pay CHF 91,374 = $93,703.5 [0] compared to USA $68,082 [1]. Their nominal GDP per capita is 36.62% higher and the pay is 37.6% higher. Norway interestingly has almost the same pay as USA - $68,737 [2], probably because of high share of oil extraction in GDP (22% [3]) which skews the result. If you subtract oil share from the GDP, you get $56,195.88 nominal GDP per capita, which is…
Dude. You're not getting the objection. We're not objecting to the numeric ratios, we're objecting to using those numbers in the first place. > GDP per capita seems to be a curious way to estimate if a local dev is likely to be productive. Curious is putting it mildly. :) What is being objected to is your _measure_. Stop using the GDP per capita of an entire country as a proxy for software developer productivity. It'…
Outside of entertainment where software is a direct consumer product, the developer's productivity comes from increased efficiency of use of other productive resources. You can't eat code, but you can eat food that comes from higher production due to better software. So software has a multiplicative effect on existing production. That is, GDP.
Now even added value of entertainment software (games etc) depends on total GDP, because people have to pay with something for that entertainment.
So average developer's productivity IS a function of GDP, with different coefficient depending on the structure of a economy.
A primitive non-mechanized agricultural economy would have a coefficient of near zero because there's almost nothing to automate.
>Anyway GDP per capita using PPP (purchasing power parity) is seen as a fairer comparison.
A fundamentally wrong metric because pay is nominal.
Spanish dev here, 3 years in the business, been twice a freelancer and twice an employee. My main complaints: - The maximum salary a developer can earn at any given company is almost written in stone - around 36000 euros. Every public job posting will have that figure as the max. When it's higher, they'll water it down in the interview. Why? Probably because they don't have the notion of a 10x programmer at all. We a…
Have you considered working remotely for a US company? I know a guy making €7 or 8,000 per month, after tax, living in Paris. Best of both worlds: amazing quality of living, cheap cost of living + healthcare, lots of spending (or investing) money! Seems to be working well for him.
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Paris is much less expensive than the bay area, but more expensive than the average US city. In fact, it's barely less expensive than NYC, one of the most expensive US cities. Also, if you are working remotely you cannot command a bay area salary.
You can command a bay area salary. There are a lot of companies out there who cannot find skills because everyone is in the bay area, and want to work at the coolest company possible. There are a lot of uncool companies who need those same skills, and will pay to get them. Hell, they pay consultants far more to fly in and do the work if they can't find someone remotely.
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I think you can easily be a 10x developer, since 10x is relative. Especially in a world awash in bad developers. Just being familiar with the right algorithms and software approaches vis-a-vis your co-workers will do that. I've seen "enterprise" code that was doing tons of string key-value pair lookups using arrays. Just converting those to hashtables could very well speed up the app by 10+ times if the key-value loo…
> Especially in a world awash in bad developers. Your comment is totally reasonable. You're being down-voted because the sentiment of that statement is so negative but in some ways it's true. There is widespread encouragement from society for individuals to learn how to program. In the last 5 decades the group that operates primarily from this motivation has exploded. The much older fanatical nerd group (originating…
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Developers are not fungible. But in my opinion: this "10x" term really has to go away. We need a better way to describe the reality that there's a range in quality and capability for developers that doesn't suggest an order of magnitude. That just means corner cutting.
I'm sure technical ability falls on a curve like all other human abilities/activities. Like take weight lifting. Most people will be around the middle. Some will be able to lift heavier, some will be able to lift less. But if two people are training I would not expect one person to lift "10x" the next person. No way, no how.
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2000-3000 Euro/month is incredibly low. Fresh devs around here go for $50k+ annually, and experience costs 6 figures easily (and I'm in Philadelphia, I'm not talking SF/NY numbers). Edit (pressed submit early): some companies use remote workers to reduce costs, but I wouldn't expect to pay such a low $36k max in Europe. Remote, if managed well, is just as good as in-house. You're not worth significantly less.
I don't know how it works in Spain, but in Italy the cost of an employee is probably much more than his/her salary. The employer gives you a salary, then they have to pay on top of it ~30% of INAIL, INPS etc. (pension, health "insurance" including sick days and so on) and ~10% of TFR (fund you get back at the end of your career.) In the U.S. those are costs you have to remove from your salary. So, 3000 euros a month…
Spanish dev here. I created with some friends the most active Maker group in Spain [1]. We won contests like Hyperloop's, NASA's SpaceApps (once winners, twice finalists), making robot competitions [2], teaching to everyone, etc. A couple of days ago we were talking about who would continue it, since ALL of us are leaving the country for different reasons. So I can say that I know what it means that skilled workers a…
Same shit in Italy and the Netherlands. I get with very low offers, recruiters are shocked that I bill $100-150 per hour.
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Very true. Just compare salaries of software engineers in most EU countries with salaries in the US. If you're a good developer, 99% of the time it's better to work remotely from Europe for a US company. It really is a simple problem to solve -- pay talented people in Europe more. And yet, for some reason, this is often dismissed by CEOs as a ridiculous statement. They're probably the same people who think you need 1…
> It really is a simple problem to solve -- pay talented people in Europe more. And yet, for some reason, this is often dismissed by CEOs as a ridiculous statement. I don't think it's European vs American CEOs, it's treating software engineering as cost center vs value creator. Even in the US one would likely have a hard time procuring a large compensation package employed as a software engineer in a utility company,…
in which case, there ought to be market pressure for software engineers to move away from such companies. When the company finds out they actually need a good programmer, they end up having to pay more again for quality (perhaps, indirectly, via consulting companies). But the current anecdotal evidence is that those companies _can_ pay very little, and yet, no catastrophe has happened. The only valid business conclusion is that the highly paid engineers aren't needed there!