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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)

#61

Post by rhacker »

frank_nitti wrote: post #14
sebleon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> brilliant one who is constantly going down rabbit holes unnecessarily Ha, sounds like an oxymoron

Maybe - I think the missing component is their level of "laziness" as Bill Gates defined it. A brilliant, but "lazy", coder will find the most efficient way to compose a solution that meets the requirements. But it's definitely not an oxymoron to say that some brilliant coders can go down rabbit holes at the expense of their own (and company's) time and productivity. They may spend lots of time reading white papers,…

I would much rather be refactoring code from that guy... I seem to be refactoring the industrious and stupid code.

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)

#62

Post by hinkley »

koolba wrote: post #17
sebleon wrote: post #11

I'm generally baffled when companies opt to hire a junior dev for ~$110k, when an additional 30% more income can get them someone 10x more productive.

Or they spend the +30% and get someone who’s just as productive or 10x less productive. It’s not a magic price performance formula.

Have you ever worked on a team with only senior people?

Nobody wants to do any grunt work. So everything turns into an overly automated nightmare.

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)

#63

Post by blablabla123 »

sebleon wrote: post #11

I'm generally baffled when companies opt to hire a junior dev for ~$110k, when an additional 30% more income can get them someone 10x more productive.

It may surprise you, but the people I worked with the last few years strongly preferred very senior developers.

So on the contrary one could argue that they are cheaper (yes ;)) but also can learn something new. Also I think that very junior people bring some kind of enthusiasm into teams. I guess the right mixture must be there.

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)

#64

Post by Viker »

The way I see it... Is that most good programmers are nerds who can program. Because they have been introverts and socially awkward nerds, their entire life... Those qualities have made them useful for everyone around them so they grow up to be nothing more than handy tools for their peers.

Because of that a salesman or a manager or even a taxi driver will always be able to walk over them, and "twist their arm" in a social sense.

So do we expect introverted nerds to stand up for themselves and ask for a fair wage???

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)

#65

Post by auxbuss »

trendia wrote: post #9
whack wrote: post #4

That'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

I'm reminded of The Soul of a New Machine[0] by Tracy Kidder. Essential reading, even today.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_New_M...

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)

#66

Post by djmips »

mac01021 wrote: post #32
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #22

> The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. But salaries usually fall within a fairly small range in any company. Even across the entire profession, salaries don’t vary that much. If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why aren’t they paid 10x as much? Because the 10x Programmer is a pernicious myth. Even if you believe the original study from…

I don't know.... I have not seen this study, but: 1> I feel I can safely say that I am more productive than the median programmer, as are probably a majority of visitors to Hacker News 2> I am aware of many famous programmers who are more productive than I am by at least an order of magnitude - probably two orders of magnitude.

Skeptical. You may be star struck and/or undervaluing yourself.

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)

#67

Post by haihaibye »

StevenPaul wrote: post #56
haihaibye wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were teams of 2-3 average programmers who, combined, didn't deliver what John Carmack did over his career. What about in algorithm development or research? Could an average programmer invent quicksort, dynamic programming or information theory if transported back to the mid 20th century? There is >10x productivity in scientists or mathematician using many kinds of metrics (papers, citations, awards etc)

"Could an average programmer invent quicksort, dynamic programming or information theory if transported back to the mid 20th century?" I think many could have yes, had they been in the same academic environment as the people who invented those things. It's amazing what normal people can acheive when they are isolated from the noise of modern corporate work environments and given the resources to focus on a problem.

Not only can most programmers not create it, most can't implement it:

Binary search is a great example because it's so simple and yet it's so easy to implement incorrectly. In Programming Pearly, Jon Bently shares how, over the years, he asked hundreds of programmers to implement binary search after providing them with a description of the basic algorithm. He gave them a very generous two hours to write it, and even allowed them to use the high-level language of their choice (including pseudocode). Surprisingly, only about 10 percent of professional programmers implemented binary search correctly. (Beautiful Code, p. 87)

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)

#68

Post by dbuder »

Viker wrote: post #64

The way I see it... Is that most good programmers are nerds who can program. Because they have been introverts and socially awkward nerds, their entire life... Those qualities have made them useful for everyone around them so they grow up to be nothing more than handy tools for their peers. Because of that a salesman or a manager or even a taxi driver will always be able to walk over them, and "twist their arm" in a…

I've always thought programming was underpaid. A really good senior dev should cost 4x what they do now.

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)

#69

Post by modbait »

skookumchuck wrote: post #15
modbait wrote: post #2

Good 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…

When you save a company $$$, it's important to bring that up at annual review time, and definitely place it on your resume.

Unfortunately, mentioning this politically sensitive issue in such a manner would have been career suicide. (And I suspect that this is not rare for such black swans.)

Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)

#70

Post by mac01021 »

djmips wrote: post #66
mac01021 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know.... I have not seen this study, but: 1> I feel I can safely say that I am more productive than the median programmer, as are probably a majority of visitors to Hacker News 2> I am aware of many famous programmers who are more productive than I am by at least an order of magnitude - probably two orders of magnitude.

Skeptical. You may be star struck and/or undervaluing yourself.

More likely I simply have a much lower estimation than you do of the productivity of the median programmer.
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