Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity
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Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity
#2My proudest moments as a programmer are those where I manage to develop some functionality in a week or two that took another team of programmers months or years to do by using a novel approach or stitching together preexisting code. Every line of code I write is another I will have to maintain. Sooner or later it will be a burden. For this reason, I strive to write as few as possible. The programmers I respect most seem to follow the same pattern.
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity
#3Really it comes down to the simple fact that for the most part programmers happily sign a contract saying they will work X hours for Y money. If they are 'productive' they then can move up in the company and be a manager, but still for X and Y++. Sales guys are paid in a completely different way, same with the stock holders (founders etc). It doesn't matter how productive you are, even if you complete the task in 1 hour and have the rest of the week to do nothing, you agreed to work 40 so your boss will give you something new to do.
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity
#4Show me how to measure productivity and I'll find a way for the 10x more productive programmer to earn 10x the compensation.
I agree with the OP that the problem here is that it is not easy to measure productivity.
http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-02-1...
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity
#5> The most productive programmers orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers
This is often repeated, never meaningfully demonstrated. I doubt it is true if we are excluding unqualified programmers.
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity
#6From the comments:
> I’d love to see some metrics on the average life expectancy of a line of code for different programmers. I know that some of my best code was written and has sat there with minimal changes ever since.
Now that's an interesting idea.
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity
#7> The most productive programmers orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers This is often repeated, never meaningfully demonstrated. I doubt it is true if we are excluding unqualified programmers.
Always remember the classic story about "where to put the X"...
Have you ever heard of Charlie Steinmetz? Legend has it that he was a prominent electrical engineer in the early twentieth century. Not long after his retirement, all of the engineers at General Electric had a problem. Although each was wise, they were unable to understand the complexity of the machinery. A call was made and Charlie Steinmetz came to the plant to offer his assistance.
Ol’ Charlie walked around the machine for a few minutes, just looking it over, not touching anything. After a few minutes, Charlie took out a piece of chalk, walked over and placed a large X on one particular part of the machine. When the other engineers disassembled the machine, they were amazed to find that it was exactly where the problem was. A few days later, the engineers received an invoice from Charlie for $10,000! This was a lot of money in those days, so they returned it to Charlie and ask that he itemize it. A few days later, they received an itemized bill which read:
Making one X mark – $1.00
Knowing where to place the X – $9999.00
Even if one tosses the idea that there are "rockstar programmers" who are 10x more productive than merely good ones, someone with the right experience and domain knowledge can be priceless. I have certainly found cases in which I could merely hear the symptoms of a very subtle bug and find it in 2 minutes, whereas a great programmer unfamiliar with the codebase, field, and my past experience might have taken a week to find it.
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity
#8> The most productive programmers orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers This is often repeated, never meaningfully demonstrated. I doubt it is true if we are excluding unqualified programmers.
Never meaningfully demonstrated? Have you tried to verify the claim?
Go read Peopleware. You will find described very carefully set up coding comparisons that routinely found a factor of 10 productivity difference between different experienced programmers on the same task, and also a discussion of what organizational factors lead to those productivity differences.
There is other research on the topic as well. For instance http://www.computer.org/portal/web/buildyourcareer/fa035?utm... cites "individual differences" research that found a 30 fold difference between mediocre programmers and the top programmers. That article is supposed to be a distillation of http://www.amazon.com/Facts-Fallacies-Software-Engineering-R... so I'd look there if you want citations into how that research was done and what exactly they found.
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity
#9> The most productive programmers orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers This is often repeated, never meaningfully demonstrated. I doubt it is true if we are excluding unqualified programmers.
I think that part of the problem is unqualified programmers are part of the equation. The amount of "developers" out there who have no idea what they're doing is shocking. The dot-com implosion helped cut some of the excess weight, but there are still a lot of people working in software who have no excuse being there.
Re: Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity
#10> The most productive programmers orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers This is often repeated, never meaningfully demonstrated. I doubt it is true if we are excluding unqualified programmers.
Always remember the classic story about "where to put the X"... Have you ever heard of Charlie Steinmetz? Legend has it that he was a prominent electrical engineer in the early twentieth century. Not long after his retirement, all of the engineers at General Electric had a problem. Although each was wise, they were unable to understand the complexity of the machinery. A call was made and Charlie Steinmetz came to the…
There are so many variations of that story floating around that someone may have heard it, but not recognize any detail of the version you gave. http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=183998 cites several other variations for comparison.