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I only need one skilled person to solve the curly problems, what I really need is people who do what they say they are going to do without screwing things up.
That said that one person will probably be in an elevated position of responsibility and have an elevated wage respectful of that position. So as a senior role he would have more, but not to skill alone, also responsibility.
The three developers suffer from Conway's law[1], unless working very closely. And more people take more space, which costs more money. So, in general, more people, even the salary cost is the same, is a worse deal economically. But you may not notice the issues with only with 3 people. Try comparing 30 vs 10. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Law
It becomes even more obvious when you consider more and more talented workers. I've met people that were easily five or ten times better than their peers, and they were the difference between a tightly-coordinated three-person team and a fifteen-person failure.
This poll doesn't really pertain to hiring super-talented people who build JS VMs for Google or rich-UIs for Khan Academy. I'm just talking about productive developers who can do the same thing that usually requires a team of 3-5 average developers.
Risk of the person leaving is probably highest on the list.
You see 2x or 3x the normal rate in consulting. You are paying for a temporary boost in expertise.
Salary wise it usually doesn't happen because you don't want that much risk.
I think it would be viable to have all programmers like this at a single company. I've heard anecdotally that some financial firms will pay salary in the 500k range in order to (a) attract world class talent and (b) ensure loyalty.[1]
[1] For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov . According to Wikipedia, making $400k before he quit, and he was involved enough in coding to try to take some of it with him. I actually don't know that this is materially more than he would have been making at Google, I tried checking glassdoor.com but what is listed there doesn't match what I've heard.
Assuming its my company and we're a small outfit I'd love to have them but I wouldn't pay 3x (or even 2x) overhead. 1) At a 3x salary you'll need to lose two other employees and sacrifice the redundancy, idea mix etc that you point out. Reducing the HR etc overhead by two employees is far less of a gain. 2) Their higher output is going to be at least partially due to more intensive work habits which may not be sustai…
I don't know if (2) is necessarily true. Experience, skills, talent, and ability to focus well could easily make this sustainable.
In my experience, (3) happens when they were hired at 1x salary, proved themselves to be 3x as productive, but continue to get just 3% cost-of-living raises. If you compensate them well (and the work-environment remains hospitable), they have very few compensation-related reasons to move. Nevertheless, I agree that they can still leave due to personal reasons.
Yes, and here's why. it's not about project productivity, it's about building your company. "A" players hire "A" players. "B" player hire "C" players. "C" Players don't want to look bad so they hire "F" players. That being said, I wouldn't pay them 3x in straight salary. Equity and profit sharing is a better motivator.
As mentioned redundancy is important but you can accomplish plenty with just one developer to start, think ruby, python, ruby on rails, javascript, etc.. Based on my gut feeling I answered yes although this sort compensation seem to be rarely practical. It's a simple poll to a sophisticated problem. What if you can only afford to pay for 2 developers ? Or you can afford 3x the pay but the developer can really perform…