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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.'"
See, for instance, section 2 (Productivity) of the Hacker FAQ.
I have, on rare occasions, been Amazingly Productive. There are very narrowly-defined kinds of work where I am super fast. One of them is debugging. So, when we were doing our "no new features, clear out every P1 and P2 bug in this branch" run, I was awesome -- I regularly fixed many more bugs than anyone else. On the other hand... A lot of the time, I'm not much good. If I have a bad-ADHD week, I can have an entire day go by where I simply never quite get around to doing anything but mostly keeping up on my inbox.
So am I super productive, or not very productive, or what? I don't know. Realistically, the answer is probably "if you give me the sorts of work I'm good at, I'm great, otherwise I'm sorta mediocre." But I'm not sure how you'd measure that.
There's also a much more basic failure-to-apply-economics in the article. The value of something which does 10x as much is not necessarily exactly 10x. Is a monitor with 3x as many pixels worth exactly 3x as much? No. Is a video card which can render exactly 2x as many polygons worth exactly 2x as much? No. On the high end, you might see people paying 2x as much for 20% more polygons. On the low end, you might see people paying 20% more for 5x more polygons. Or there might be other factors; you might care about power consumption, or form factor, or...
I just bought a new Eee. It's SLOWER than the previous one I was using. I paid about the same amount for it, several months later. But it has a higher resolution display, and better battery life... So is it worth the same amount? I have no clue.
Long story short: The marginal value of the "more productive programmer" is not necessarily linear with productivity. Add in other complexities (plays-well-with-others, can do trade shows, reliable about giving feedback on progress) and general market forces, and I don't think it's just a question of measurement; I think it's largely that, in general, programmers are willing to work for comparable amounts of money, and the marginal benefits aren't as large as you might think they would be if you looked only at some measure of productivity. Even if it were a very good measure.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
in addition to the factors pointed out by others there is this:
Programmer "A" is an expert and they have a strong opinion that approach "Y" is the best approach- and it is a solid approach.
Programmer "B" is an expert and they have a strong opinion that approach "P" is the best approach- and it is a solid approach.
Programmer "C" is an expert and they have a strong opinion that approach "3" is the best approach- and it is a solid approach.
I've seen A,B, and C get into very loud, very heated arguments over this (I've been programmer A at times when I thought the "solid" approach was missing something that I saw intuitively which they wouldn't accept until I proved it to them laboriously).
Programming is not plumbing. The goal posts are subject to change.
What is efficiency?
Delivering a 100% perfect product 3 months late?
Delivering a 99% perfect product 1 week early?
Delivering a 100% perfect product 3 weeks early but then they change the scope and (as one manager said to me) say "this isn't scope creep". (I turned to my programmer and asked, "can you deliver this change by the previous deadline" and they said "no" and I asked "what date can you deliver it by, and she said 5 days later, and I turned back to the sheepishly smiling manager and said, "is that date acceptable?" -- I mention this because it's a great negotiating technique. And you avoid delivering the product later than the delivered deadline without being an ass and refusing changes).
I've known "great" programmers who were- as long as they were the only one in the company- because they used operating system cheats that worked-- as long as someone else didn't use them too.
A lot of great programmers fail to understand the business side of things.
And you can never control being put on a crappy project with a bad deadline and a bad manager.
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However, fundamentally- the compensation isn't there because there are too many people willing to do the work. I do not recommend to people who ask me that they enter the IT field in general any more. It's pay is not sufficient to cover the low status, increasing lack of freedom, required holiday work, and offshoring risk.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The kitten of capitalism is fine. It's just that it grows into a cat.
It's not capitalism you want to get rid of. It's corporatism.
If you've ever dealt with a private bureaucracy, you know that they can be just as bad as government. The problem is more that the organazations don't scale. Also, the tendancy for all these corps to behave in a similar way dulls the effect of competition.
As individuals we don't have much power; but we can start by patronizing small businesses even if it costs more. Think of the added cost as a tax paid to a shaddow government, the true government of the people--the one that fights the big corporations instead of working for them.
No, this is not communism. Communism is dead. It's a 19th century idea born out of the first wave of industrialization. We need 21st century ideas, so forget the tradtional worker vs. capitalist tension, please, Please forget it. Let's not relive that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
My dad was a programmer for the Star Tribune, back in the seventies and eighties.
Two things he said stick in my mind.
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.
2. When he got, say, a directive from On High that he must "write a new program for the secretaries", the first thing he did was go and sit down with the secretaries, ask them about their work, and stick around for a while to actually watch them work. He called this the "going native" phase (he took his degree in anthropology). If he'd started coding on the basis of the directive from On High, the end result would be something the secretaries didn't need and wouldn't use.
-kgj
The best coders I have seen wrote amazingly little code. I am not talking about crazy pointer arithmetic but just way less code than lesser programmers. Often the best programmers also deployed the available resources way better. When all is said and done the best programmers leave code that everyone worships as pure genius that everyone else builds on with ease. A great example was someone who did some great code where they took the bull buy the horns and moved the project into proper multithreading and some crazy memory usage. The server went from using maybe 10Megs per process to a collective 8Gigs spread across many threads. Sounds complex but every programmer took one look at the code and went wow. 20 servers out of 23 previously heavily loaded servers were shut down as unneeded. Even with 50% client growth every year our next server purchase will probably be in a decade. That super programmer moved on and we just kept building on his code for a long time. Programming and debugging went from a chore to a joy. Anyone could tell which code was new code because it was ugly and complex compared to the simple elegance of the original code. Without a doubt that programmer could replace the 50 pretty good programmers we have on staff now. Plus his code eliminated 3 full time system admins and has resulted in zero downtime in two years, thus avoiding millions in losses over the last and next few years. So what should his pay have been? 5 Million a year? On a different topic, in my travels I have seen sys admins who ran well oiled machines that were amazing. At the same time I have seen sys admins who weren't properly backing up critical data. Critical as in the company would go bust in the event of a HD failure. In these same companies they had HR, CFO's, and Sales people who were paid multiples of the Admin. These "senior" managem who's screwups would be hard pressed to completely wreck the company usually saw the various computer people as a bit of a joke.
Heck forget memory limits, those were easy (he said, using his tongue to push his dentures back onto the roof of his mouth while tugging his pants up over his belly button), one time my lab partner and I re-coded our elevator simulator (written in machine code, not assembler, you wimps!) so that we could enter it with a hexadecimal keypad that was broken so the "E" key debounce didn't work. For you whippersnappers who never entered machine code with a keypad (not keyboard!) or switches, that means we rewrote it so that no machine instruction (one byte instructions) or data byte had "1110" as the lowest four bits. No that was programming.
Cyril, my lab partner, wound up being Bob Moog's protege and has become the key designer at Moog. Wonder if he remembers that afternoon in EE lab.
Then there was Bob in high school, who reconfigured RSTS control blocks through the front panel switches on the PDP-11/40 to enable root-like privileges. Now, that was art: several levels of indirection, the machine needed to be halted to use the panel, but it was a timeshare system and you had to get it running before any of the users noticed. Pure art, until that one time he made a mistake and caused a crash that rewrote the master file directory with all zeroes. That was a long night writing, testing, and running a program in BASIC that used heuristics to read the disks and a three month old backup (for getting user IDs and old passwords) to recover the directories on the disk. When the security guard came in at 3 AM, Chris (the friend helping me fix Bob's mistake) had to talk the security guard into not waking up the Dean of Students to report us. Bob got kicked off the admin staff for a while. Things got boring after that.
Now, back to my afternoon nap.
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.
Actually, this is the way that "creative" professions have generally worked. Consider the typical sculptor or painter. Even those that reached a level of fame have usually been paid only once for each creation. It is then owned by the client, who can resell it and not give the creator any part of the sale. There are a few countries that have dabbled with royalties for resale, but this is rare, and the royalties are typically small. The real profit from art goes to the sponsors and investors.
Authors and musicians have had some small success in getting royalties for their work. But this is most often "honored in the breach". It's well known that recording artists don't get any royalties at all, and may lose money, unless the recording sells around 1.5 to 2 million copies. Before that, all the income goes to the owner of the recording, which is the corporation that produced and marketed it. Even after a recording reaches the profitable stage, the artist typically gets only a few percent of each sale. The situation is similar with authors, who may be paid a small "advance" before production, but rarely makes a profit until several million copies have been sold. Most writers have worked for corporations such as newspapers or other periodicals, who pay a salary and claim all income from sales.
The movie industry has a few showcase stars who have made a small fortune in royalties. But most actors are "starving artists" who have to work at part-time jobs to get rent and food money. Movies are owned by the producers, not the actors. The few stars are held out as bait to attract the many workers who will never be stars and will never make a decent living from their creativity.
Software programmers like to think that they're something new that the world has never seen. But in reality they are merely creators in a new medium, and they are treated as the commercial world has always treated creative types. They're workers who can be paid a small salary to produce, and when they produce something that sells, the corporation can claim the profits. A few stars can be paid some royalties (still only a few percent of sales) and held up as public examples to attract the many workers that the industry needs.
Don't expect to see this change in your lifetime.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
He also wrote an article about how Exceptions are pointless and a waste of time,
and that we should track "ErrorNumbers" ourselves manually.
He completely ignored the fact that exceptions were developed to solve
the problem of "working out in the stack where the error happened", and when
people pointed that out how ridiculous his solution was he refused to change
his mind. So screw it.