Programmers and “productivity”

The article makes a number of major mistakes that discredit its whole thesis.

1. My source for the productivity figure is Peopleware. They cite a set of "coding war games" that found a repeatedly measured 10x variation between the best and the worst programmers in their work environment. The productivity difference showed up under a variety of different measurements. There is no vagueness about the measurement techniques or doubt about the figure.

2. The 10x figure was from best to worst, from best to median was (IIRC) 2.6 times.

3. A significant portion of the figure they measured was correlated with environment, and the strongest predictor of performance was the performance of your coworkers. That said their study technique couldn't tell the difference between whether environment attracted the best people, or whether environment caused people to become more productive. (From the point of view of a smart employer there isn't too much difference between those hypotheses.)

4. People accept compensation in many ways, and not all of them involve money. I believe that the better a programmer is, the more apt they are to be willing to trade salary for better work environment, more interesting co-workers, more interesting problems, etc. As a concrete example I have heard anecdotes from many people claiming that people are willing to accept sometimes substantial pay cuts for the privilege of working at Google.

5. Whatever the cause, in the Peopleware study the difference in pay between the top and bottom half of programmers was less than 10%. Furthermore productivity was basically uncorrelated with various factors people look at in the hiring process such as years of experience. That is direct evidence that it is a bad idea to measure productivity by salary.

When you put all of these factors together, you simply can't point to market forces then salaries to discount real performance differences between working programmers.

The expectation of market clearing for programmer wages is completely implausible here.

Going independent requires additional skills beyond the programming productivity that we're supposedly trying to measure, is perceived as riskier (and it's generally understood that most people are irrationally risk-averse), and may involve additional practical complications, such as if our hypothetical programmer relies on salaried employment to provide health insurance for a family. So "would this programmer make more independently" is pretty much an irrelevant question.

As for moving between "regular" jobs, there's little evidence that most hiring processes can distinguish programmers by productivity, nor that most organizations measure the productivity of employed programmers in a useful way. Switching jobs also has practical obstacles, such as the disruption of relocating, and avoiding the perception of "job hopping". So as far as we can tell, salaries have little relationship with productivity, which is kind of the whole point.

Fundamentally, the article makes the mistake of taking principles that are simplifying assumptions in economics and then arguing as if they're universally correct. This is roughly akin to an argument like "Things tend to fall down, so it's a fallacy to ask why helium balloons float."

Of course, you can simply define someone's productivity as the market value of their time and thus "prove" that order of magnitude differences in productivity between programmers don't generally exist, but proof-by-redefining-the-terms doesn't really make for a persuasive argument.

"If our newly-independent programmer does not make 10x the money, we must admit that she is not the 10x programmer we thought she was." Not a good metric. The signal is at least polluted by social skills and geography - in some areas of the midwest, the social construct of the traditional company is much more entrenched than in some places in CA. Also, I'm 29 and I have no family - I could work totally different places and locations than a family man with roots, which opens up my possibilities much more. imho, conflating the concept of profitability and productivity is not a good idea.

I agree with the other commenters: the author rather trivially assumes his conclusion by taking for granted that the market is rational. It isn't. One can argue about why. I tend to believe it's because we're still early in the history of the software: the closest analogy we have is the Industrial Revolution, and Ford and Taylor don't appear until well over a century into that.

The other side of the coin, of course, is that an irrational market represents major opportunity for anyone who figures out how to exploit it. So we all should stop complaining and start exploiting. Hopefully the hacker renaissance and startup wave of the last few years are the start of such a process, but it's too early to know for sure.

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