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Why do business analysts and PMs get higher salaries than programmers?

programmers.stackexchange.com

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Re: Why do business analysts and PMs get higher salaries than programmers?

#11

Post by kevinh »

gouranga wrote: post #5
Karunamon wrote: post #3

Aside: Yet another useful and thought provoking question and set of answers on SE shut down "because it's not a good fit for the format".

Yes this is getting annoying. I think when a site reaches critical mass, the pedants and moderati (play on illuminati) start screwing it up. Wikipedia is another fine example of this. I've stopped contributing to stack overflow now due to this (I accumulated 20k karma to give you an idea how much I thought the idea was promising)

It's not really as easy as you make it sound. Incorrect moderation will cripple a site and prevent people from contributing, but moderation is necessary to prevent the site from declining in quality. Without moderation, a site's quality will decline with its increased size. The default subreddits on reddit are a good example of what will happen without sufficient moderation.

Re: Why do business analysts and PMs get higher salaries than programmers?

#12

Post by sardonicbryan »

I'm a little surprised that the top answers on Stack Exchange accept the premise that analysts and PMs get paid higher salaries. That is certainly not the case at my company (mid sized tech startup), nor I would imagine at most other tech companies.

Re: Why do business analysts and PMs get higher salaries than programmers?

#17

Post by yashchandra »

gouranga wrote: post #2

They get paid the same as junior programmers where I work. They are deemed as equal value to the company. To be 100% honest a good developer should be able to take on all three roles. PM and BA are skills which should be built in as well along side other basics.

"a good developer should be able to take on all three roles" I generally would agree with you but it is not that simple. A good BA or PM can do lot of dirty work that the programmers can be shielded from in order to focus on their core value: code/build the product. Some of those dirty tasks are: 1. dealing with difficult business users who keep changing their scope and requirements. Can you imagine if you had to develop the product while the scope keeps changing ? A good BA/PM would negotiate that for you and help stop scope creep. 2. Looking at the bigger picture. This includes ensuring all the connected project members are delivering, communication is in place, people are talking to each other and everyone is on the same page. No one enjoys doing this dirty work but it brings tremendous value to a project.

There are more like these but you get the idea. Yes there are BA/PMs that do not do their task well but incompetence is not retricted to a particular line of work, is it ?

Re: Why do business analysts and PMs get higher salaries than programmers?

#18

Post by nicw »

I view the PM role akin the role a sweeper plays in curling. A good PM will clear the path for others on the team to do what they do best. Sometimes that's wrangling with devops so the developers can keep programming, or it's calling a meeting with stakeholders to brief them on potential issues before they get out of control.

A good PM is offensive, not reactive and thats why a lot of times it seems like they're just calling meetings. They're generally the only person that interacts with all the different teams (management, QA, dev, IT) and so they can see the upcoming roadblocks. IF they get those solved beforehand that's worth some $$$ :)

Re: Why do business analysts and PMs get higher salaries than programmers?

#19

Post by gm »

Karunamon wrote: post #3

Aside: Yet another useful and thought provoking question and set of answers on SE shut down "because it's not a good fit for the format".

+1. But neither coding horror nor joel give a sh*t about that:

coding horror: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4132668 - Basically says "If you're bitching about it, it's because it's working as intended"

Joel: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4132020 - Says "Yeah, but look at the quality"

I just want a filter for high-activity closed SE Q/A's, that way I can read highly engaging and interesting topics.

Re: Why do business analysts and PMs get higher salaries than programmers?

#20

Post by gouranga »

kevinh wrote: post #11
gouranga wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is getting annoying. I think when a site reaches critical mass, the pedants and moderati (play on illuminati) start screwing it up. Wikipedia is another fine example of this. I've stopped contributing to stack overflow now due to this (I accumulated 20k karma to give you an idea how much I thought the idea was promising)

It's not really as easy as you make it sound. Incorrect moderation will cripple a site and prevent people from contributing, but moderation is necessary to prevent the site from declining in quality. Without moderation, a site's quality will decline with its increased size. The default subreddits on reddit are a good example of what will happen without sufficient moderation.

I agree but both SE and Wikipedia suffer from moderators being picked based on karma. Karma is achievable easily despite any motives and personality traits which are bad. They should be picked by humans as they are a better and more objective judge of who is fit to moderating a site to the site's standards.
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