That's the problem with being so good that you make it look easy. Everything thinks that it's <i>actually</i> easy, and no one gives you credit for it.<p>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.
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.
FTA: "Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code."<p>I'll take an average coder who only codes what is needed over a brilliant one who is constantly going down rabbit holes unnecessarily.
Good insights. In addition, there are good reasons to think that the value that programmers produce isn't even measurable in any practical way.<p>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?<p>Programmers--like many other professionals--are simply paid the least possible needed to keep them in their seats.
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.
> They may know where to find reusable or re-editable code that solves their problem. They may cheat.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I supposed my intuition wasn't wrong - even though it felt guilty.
> <i>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?</i><p>Because the 10x Programmer is a pernicious myth.<p>Even if you believe the original study from the '60s, it found that the best programmers were 10 times better than than the <i>worst</i> programmers, and only 2-3x better than the average.
Like many “preventative” things, it can be hard to prove that problems <i>would</i> have occurred with less experienced/productive people because you only have one team and outcome in any situation.<p>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 <i>kinds</i> of bugs, and might encourage people to create micro-bugs to inflate numbers or mega-reports to make them smaller, depending).
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.
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.<p>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.<p>So do we expect introverted nerds to stand up for themselves and ask for a fair wage???
The code programmers write is worth $0 without the surrounding organization.<p><i>The company makes the code valuable. </i><p>Programmers are paid based on supply and demand. It's a completely different measure.