Why Coder Pay Isn't Proportional To Productivity

theodp writes "John D. Cook takes a stab at explaining why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity. The basic problem, Cook explains, is that extreme programmer productivity may not be obvious. A salesman who sells 10x as much as his peers will be noticed, and compensated accordingly. And if a bricklayer were 10x more productive than his peers, this would be obvious too (it doesn't happen). But the best programmers do not write 10x as many lines of code; nor do they work 10x as many hours. Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code. An über-programmer, Cook explains, is likely to be someone who stares quietly into space and then says 'Hmm. I think I've seen something like this before.'"

Comments

Re:there are Programmers then here are PROGRAMMERS

[ahabswhale]

I'm not aware of any evidence that makes me believe BG is a particularly impressive programmer and coding for 64k limits is hardly a metric for skill. You're obviously too young but a lot of us were coding to 4k limits or even much less. 64k is downright roomy especially with assembler or procedural languages. When I finally got a Commodore 64, I didn't know what to do with all that memory. It was hard to imagine how to use it all. Shit, I used to write custom databases for the military in Turbo Pascal that compiled to under 8k.