
Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009) - walterclifford
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/12/23/why-programmers-are-not-paid-in-proportion-to-their-productivity/
======
whack
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 it in parallel, and examine what
exactly each group does and how well that turns out.

~~~
trendia
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

~~~
Boulth
> Google does this to a degree. They sometimes give the same project/goal to
> multiple groups and pick the winning one.

Yep, we've seen that with their messaging platforms.

------
Waterluvian
You don't pay me to solve your problems at my desk from 9-5. You pay me to do
it in the shower, on a walk, when doing my dishes, etc. And I'm surely not
going to be time tracking those things.

~~~
paulddraper
[http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-09-15](http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-09-15)

> Here's my time sheet filled out in increments of fifteen minutes.

> As usual, I coded the useless hours spent in meetings as "work", whereas the
> time I spent in the shower designing circuits in my mind is "non-work".

------
qume
FTA: "Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code."

I'll take an average coder who only codes what is needed over a brilliant one
who is constantly going down rabbit holes unnecessarily.

~~~
sebleon
> brilliant one who is constantly going down rabbit holes unnecessarily

Ha, sounds like an oxymoron

~~~
frank_nitti
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, improving a
design/implementation/test-suite beyond what is required, etc. It's just these
coders don't place a high value on being as efficient as possible from a PM's
perspective, but might be able to solve a problem 10x as difficult as the guy
who is closing his tickets within hours of assignment.

~~~
ropeadopepope
This reminds me of the following by General Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord:

> "I divide my officers into four classes as follows: The clever, the
> industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of
> these qualities.

> Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can
> under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The
> man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He
> has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But
> whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too
> dangerous."

~~~
gp7
I'm clever and stupid.

------
modbait
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? And how can you
account for it in compensation, even if you wanted to?

Programmers--like many other professionals--are simply paid the least possible
needed to keep them in their seats.

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

~~~
dilyevsky
At Google I was explicitly told not to use $ value in my perf review/promo
form by multiple managers. There and at other companies i worked for i found
that management cares more about revenue (more engagement, new features,
releases, etc) than costs (code quality, performance, etc).

~~~
ehnto
Interesting! I have had the opposite experience at smaller companies.

A cynical view might be that in larger companies, the goal setting only
materializes as dollar values higher up the chain so that they can benefit
from that negotiation leverage.

A less cynical view is that business-speak and goal setting naturally
abstracts away from money as you try to manage larger goals down a chain of
people.

------
sebleon
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.

~~~
koolba
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.

~~~
hinkley
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.

------
jriot
> They may know where to find reusable or re-editable code that solves their
> problem. They may cheat.

I have done this since I started learning to program, which is only 4 years
ago. I have been able to complete many tasks quicker than my co-worker. I
always assumed I was going about it lazily and not working hard enough
compared to him.

My boss believes I quite productive and gets things done efficient and
correct, so I kept doing these practices and only writing code that needed to
be written from scratch.

I supposed my intuition wasn't wrong - even though it felt guilty.

------
PhasmaFelis
> _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 the '60s, it found that the best
programmers were 10 times better than than the _worst_ programmers, and only
2-3x better than the average.

~~~
alain_gilbert
Am I the only one who believe that the "10x programmer" might actually be
someone who is just as good as the others, but actually work constantly and is
self sufficient ?

~~~
doctorless
I believe this, mostly. There are those who refuse to learn and do poorly, but
compared to an average programmer instead of the worst, the real difference is
ability to remain focused despite interruption (or a good mitigation
strategy), a desire to improve oneself, and a willingness to continue working
through a solution to either completion or determination of it being the wrong
answer and finding an alternative.

------
makecheck
Like many “preventative” things, it can be hard to prove that problems _would_
have occurred with less experienced/productive people because you only have
one team and outcome in any situation.

And there’s a lot of easy-sounding ways to “measure” quality that actually
suck (e.g. “number of bug reports” says nothing about the _kinds_ of bugs, and
might encourage people to create micro-bugs to inflate numbers or mega-reports
to make them smaller, depending).

~~~
Nomentatus
Right. When the company dies or goes down for some while, you may be able to
identify the minus-ten-times employee who allowed that to happen. But he's
likely long gone by then.

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duxup
Measuring productivity is hard. Everywhere I've worked there were attempts and
the system always became gamified and skewed. Incentive hitting a number(s)
and folks will hit it.... at the expense of a lot of other things.

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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???

------
dustingetz
The stronger party will match the weaker’s second best offer

------
shanghaiaway
The code programmers write is worth $0 without the surrounding organization.

 _The company makes the code valuable._

Programmers are paid based on supply and demand. It's a completely different
measure.

~~~
firstplacelast
Everyone is paid based on supply/demand or rather how much leverage they have.

It would take a team of scientists and analysts to properly measure how much
value each employee creates (and even then, probably wouldn’t be 100%
accurate).

If you can’t even measure how much each employee’s contributions are “worth”
to the final product, how the hell are you supposed to pay people based on
those metrics?

The answer is, you don’t.

So if you want to get paid more, don’t worry about creating more value, worry
about increasing your leverage. Form a union or guild, learn a skill very few
people have, form close relationships with your customers, etc.

