131–133 of 133 posts
Show 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...
Start your own business (even if only a consultancy) and look at your bank account each day. That's the raw, true measure of productivity.
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You seem to have a very strict requirement for pride; I wasn't aware there was a "pitiful" tier. I feel like life would be pretty depressing if I needed to create something greater than me for the social good that had a purpose just to feel proud of my accomplishment. You can only save the whales once. Anyway, as is the saying, "whatever gets you off". If I've managed to be particularly clever or efficient or solved…
>I wasn't aware there was a "pitiful" tier. I don't know, I recall an (unnecessarily) hard-coded HTML form in a Django project with extremely poor input validation that somebody I knew wrote. It was a single field, single button form too, I might add. I refactored it with extreme prejudice.
There are "pitiful" tiers of code, relative to those who find it pitiful, but there's no such thing as pitiful pride. Essentially din0's argument is "Hey, you shouldn't feel proud about that because I have done things I consider superior! Pity yourself!" I was just trying to point out the absurd nature of that argument.
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You make good points. However... if we accept the economist's definition of productivity, then the article becomes a NOOP: We measure the marketplace, we discover that given a set of programmers with roughly the same conditions, there isn't a 10x disparity in output divided by hours worked, therefore no programmer is 10x more productive. The only way there is something to discuss is when we presume there is another m…
I think that there is easily a 10x disparity in output divided by hours worked. Why did the Etherpads just make 8 figures over the past 3 years, while I made only 6 figures? They certainly didn't work 100x more. By the economist's definition, they were easily 100x more productive. I think that there's a more interesting question in the article - why do salaries "flatten out" the productivity curve, so that programmer…