Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)
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Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)
#2Good insights. In addition, there are good reasons to think that the value that programmers produce isn't even measurable in any practical way.
A couple of years ago, I spotted a latent bug in a piece of core infrastructure software that would have caused a lengthy world-wide outage of the company when triggered. I can see that that saved the company at least $10M. But how can managers/HR/etc measure such effects? And how can you account for it in compensation, even if you wanted to?
Programmers--like many other professionals--are simply paid the least possible needed to keep them in their seats.
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)
#3Good insights. In addition, there are good reasons to think that the value that programmers produce isn't even measurable in any practical way. A couple of years ago, I spotted a latent bug in a piece of core infrastructure software that would have caused a lengthy world-wide outage of the company when triggered. I can see that that saved the company at least $10M. But how can managers/HR/etc measure such effects? An…
likewise I found a bug on a major UK website that was costing them > 500k£ per week an also early one the web as one of a two person team delivered I a month what another part of the company has quoted as a 2 year project :-(
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)
#4That's the problem with being so good that you make it look easy. Everything thinks that it's actually easy, and no one gives you credit for it.
The military periodically runs war-games, in order to assess the effectiveness of various tactics/strategies/leaders. I wonder how much we would learn if the major tech companies periodically did the same thing. Come up with a complex task, spin up multiple groups to work on it in parallel, and examine what exactly each group does and how well that turns out.
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)
#5FTA: "Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code."
I'll take an average coder who only codes what is needed over a brilliant one who is constantly going down rabbit holes unnecessarily.
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)
#6> They may know where to find reusable or re-editable code that solves their problem. They may cheat.
I have done this since I started learning to program, which is only 4 years ago. I have been able to complete many tasks quicker than my co-worker. I always assumed I was going about it lazily and not working hard enough compared to him.
My boss believes I quite productive and gets things done efficient and correct, so I kept doing these practices and only writing code that needed to be written from scratch.
I supposed my intuition wasn't wrong - even though it felt guilty.
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)
#7That's the problem with being so good that you make it look easy. Everything thinks that it's actually easy, and no one gives you credit for it. The military periodically runs war-games, in order to assess the effectiveness of various tactics/strategies/leaders. I wonder how much we would learn if the major tech companies periodically did the same thing. Come up with a complex task, spin up multiple groups to work on…
The military's peace-time job is training. Companies do not have peace-time, so they don't have time to train like that. It's too expensive. (Or at least, that will be the argument.)
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)
#8FTA: "Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code." I'll take an average coder who only codes what is needed over a brilliant one who is constantly going down rabbit holes unnecessarily.
> brilliant one who is constantly going down rabbit holes unnecessarily
Ha, sounds like an oxymoron
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)
#9That's the problem with being so good that you make it look easy. Everything thinks that it's actually easy, and no one gives you credit for it. The military periodically runs war-games, in order to assess the effectiveness of various tactics/strategies/leaders. I wonder how much we would learn if the major tech companies periodically did the same thing. Come up with a complex task, spin up multiple groups to work on…
Google does this to a degree. They sometimes give the same project/goal to multiple groups and pick the winning one.
Unfortunately, in the long run this decreases morale because you don't know if the project you are working on will ever be used
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)
#10FTA: "Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code." I'll take an average coder who only codes what is needed over a brilliant one who is constantly going down rabbit holes unnecessarily.
I'll second that sentiment.
The largest source of your tech debt may in fact be that brilliant one writing volumes of code destined to become the collective headache of future dev teams.