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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.'"
That's usually the case, but sometimes you write a piece of code that is so creative to solve a problem, it's not that someone else is incapable of reading it, rather they can't comprehend the complexity of the code. I've done that a few times.
The first time was in highschool. I wrote an app to help me with my algebra/trig.
I never saved it, but rather rewrote it from memory every day. Some days I had brainstorms of insight that allowed me to do marvelous things to improve the functionality and reduce the size. By the time the year was out, the entire program was one page of spaghetti code that nobody else could fathom, and it worked perfectly.
Back then, 6k memory was a common desktop memory, I had 16k, so yes, we saved every byte we could.
Challenge: Bet most of you under 20s couldn't write a full app for anything useful in less than 20k.
(And no cheating by copying any of the archive stuff, like the 9-liners amongst others.)
> "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."
...
But if you sleep with just _one_ sheep
Bark less. Wag more.