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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.'"
The uber-coder's code works the first time - it sits there silently and invisibly working.
Meanwhile, everyone is looking at the hard work and long hours being put in by the guy who's code needs lots of help. He gets the notice, not the guy who did it right.
This anecdote sums it up quite nicely. Now all we need is a few more of those and we have data :P
:/- spoon(_).
But, code is a product, and expected to be created. The value is obvious when it's completed, but still worthless to the bean counters until someone in sales sells it to a customer. The more customers they sell the code to, the more profitable it's become.
The thanks never comes down to the programmers. When the product is completed, it's likely they'll be let go, since no more work needs to be done. The sales staff could continue selling it for years, and making a profit.
I was told, I have to be able to sell the product. That's not where I want to be. I like creating things. I prefer to leave it up to sales to make it profitable. Unfortunately, the way most bosses run the show, development will always be a negative cashflow area, and sales will always be positive. In that, they consider development bad for the company, and forget that without our work, they'd never turn a profit.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
The other item that almost everyone overlooks is that an Uber-coder writes READABLE code. If you look at what a really good programmer writes you will be able to understand what is going on, even 10 or 20 years after it was written. Unfortunately, most people suck...
No worker in America has pay which is "proportional to productivity". That's not how our system works.
As long as you've got CEOs making 200-400 times the pay of the average worker in the same corporation, it is impossible to have any pay which is "proportional".
The specific kind of profits which most American companies strive for, the short-term profits that they return to their equity shareholders, make it necessary to pay all workers less than they are worth. And the trend is accelerating. If the same reduction in real income for workers that started during the Reagan administration continues, in 20 years the majority of American workers will be making about ten percent over minimum wage.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It seems to me that it's probably true that it'd be very hard to come up with good metrics for a programmer, but I think people should be more careful about metrics in general.
Sure, you can measure a bricklayer by how many bricks he can lay in an hour, but is that really how you want to measure him? What about quality? Doesn't it matter if the resulting wall looks good? Doesn't it matter whether the resulting wall will hold together under stress?
But now even those are pretty simple things. Let's get a little more complicated. You're a contractor and you hire 6 bricklayers. One guy doesn't seem to work as quickly as the rest, and they all give you comparable results. You fire the slow guy and suddenly all the other guys slow down. Quality drops. The client is less happy. What happened?
Maybe if you look into the situation, you find that the slow guy was slow because he was spending some of his time communicating with the client. He was spending part of his time overseeing the other bricklayers, keeping them on task, and keeping them from being too sloppy with their work. He's been serving a vital role in your team, but you don't see that just by measuring a couple simple metrics.
Like all statistics, productivity metrics can be useful, but they can also be misleading. You should make sure you really know what they mean before you make too many judgements on them. In evaluating your employees, it's better if you actually know your employees and have a sense for who they are, how they work, and how they fit together as a team. The value of a person just can't be represented in a couple of numbers.
When i have a task. i find myself 'procastrinating' for days on end, unable to commit myself directly to writing the code. during the period, the task regularly comes to my mind in sudden, odd places, doing odd things, like in wc taking a dump, trying to go to sleep, going to the grocer's and so on. then, after a few days, i suddenly sit down and swiftly complete the task. it seems like im hatching things, dealing with the thing in subconscious before doing it.
the good side, it works. and good. the bad side, i feel like im procastrinating and being irresponsible during the hatching period and its annoying.
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I'd argue that there are more of them than you think.. It's just that all the hard (and cool) stuff has already been done. So the guy who 30 years ago might have developed the first viable JIT compiler is now working on some esoteric feature of some esoteric codebase that you've probably never heard of. There's a lot more programmers now than there were when those guys got their start,
And for the record, I'm probably a better coder than Bill Gates ever was (as for a business-man, not so much).
Software that's finished in finite time? (Forever-finished, not just this-release-finished.)
What a concept! Exactly what segment of the industry are you working in over there? If my organization stopped development for a year or two just to sell the existing stuff, our competitors would soon crush us handily.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Probably games. God knows they seem to stop working on the damn things as soon as the first blush of cash crosses the table.
Bullshit. Good programmers are great at expressing themselves, thats what programmers DO. That excuse is made by crappy 'programmers' who are really just introverts who aren't actually good at programming but rather are even worse at dealing with other living creatures.
A programmers job is to take an idea and express it in a way a computer can understand. All we DO is express ourselves, if you aren't good at expressing yourself, you aren't a good programmer.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Oh, what the hell. I'll say it. That "good CEO" couldn't do the job without standing on the shoulders of everyone underneath. And emotions are *important*, because otherwise we'd be a bunch of robots (and some CEOs would love that, darling little sociopaths that they are).
Ability to shoulder risk? Stability? How many billions have we had to throw away on bailouts because a bunch of those CEOs turned out to be incapable of giving a damn about the risks - to other people - of destabilising the economy?
Frankly I don't think many here would mind that CEOs can make many times average worker pay if they didn't also see CEOs sailing off in their new yacht/plane/limo while the company retrenches a quarter of its workforce because times are "tough"...
Gross disparity during adversity (whether real or PR snow job) is poisonous to morale - and, for those who insist on "rational analysis", also to productivity.
Finally, I do think there are good CEOs out there. More than the bad. But it doesn't require a lot of bad ones to break the system, and when the system itself rewards sociopathic behaviour, that's not good and does not bode well.
I almost stopped reading when he said Joel Spolsky.
Joel is always looking down his nose at other coders who don't have degrees from MIT. Yet he thinks pointers are the ultimate test of a programmer. He has written one tool that is of note - Fogbugz. That is, if he even wrote the code.
He just reeks of "I know better". He wrote his own language to code-gen classic ASP applications, along with PHP. Right there is a red flag. Did they move to the new ASP.net platform? Nope. That wasn't good enough I guess. No they decided to stick with classic ASP and write a language that outputs both ASP and PHP. Epic arrogance combined with ignorance IMHO.
Then look at Fogbugz. It's just a typical bug tracking application. That's it. Did it need a new language? Hardly. So now these guys wasted all that time on something only they can use and it makes zero dollars. Way to go. Real top notch development there. Fact is his company is small potatoes.
Why do I rant on Joel? Because this guy is believing the shit he spouts and extrapolating from it. Frankly I'm sick of hearing from him about what makes a good programmer. If you aren't a good programmer yourself then STFU about what makes a good programmer. Writing a few insignificant applications doesn't make you a rock star.
> 1. He had his own office, and sometimes he'd put up his feet and stare off into space. He told me that people passing by his office assumed that he was "doing nothing." But, he told me, he wasn't doing "nothing", he was very much doing something: thinking.
I'll go even further. I have the privilege of working from home / running my own outfit.
I frequently simply go to sleep if I feel like it. For a while I felt guilty about this, but the reality is that I usually only doze for 10 minutes or so and when I wake up I have 5 solutions sitting in my head for what I need to do next. I'm not sure how or why it works, but I can struggle through a whole afternoon feeling sleepy and doing mediocre work or I can take a 10 minute nap and be a rock star for an hour ... so I do. I wish this was accepted practice in workplaces because I'm sure productivity would rise overall.
There is a very simple counter factual to this. CEO pay has grown 6 fold since 1990 (Forbes). The economy hasn't. Median salary hasn't. Have they somehow become six times rarer or six times more effective without the economy noticing? The market doesn't drive ceo salary. Productivity doesn't drive ceo salary.