Hacker News Reader

Comment by jey | Hacker News Reader

The "skill is proportional to experience" idea always puzzles me, especially in fields like finance and software where differences in productivity are measured in orders of magnitude. The most effective investors and programmers easily have 100x greater maximum productivity than the median.

View on HN

The most effective investors and programmers easily have 100x greater productivity than the median.

I have a hard time believing that for programmers. 10x maybe, not 100x. If this were true, they should be making tremendously more than median programmers. When was the last time you heard about a software engineer employee making over $1m, let alone $10m?

Measuring things by times-faster is not really the right way to do it. Some software engineers are capable of completing important tasks, some are not. They are (error-divide-by-zero) better.

> software engineer employee making over $1m

Employers don't have any incentive to pay an especially effective programmer at whatever his "market rate" actually is. They just need to pay enough to fill their position with someone skilled, and there's plenty of programmers who'll take the near-guarantee of $MaxSalary/yr and live happily. ("After you've got enough to settle down and buy hardware whenever you need it, what else do you need?") If you want to realize your full "fair market value" (which is just a convenient theoretical fiction anyway), you need to take matters into your own hands.

I also don't think there's a consistent 100x variation in overall productivity/output, but maybe something more like maximum productivity (and edited the grandparent post). If you have a super-productive employee it's going to be hard to "fully saturate the pipeline" since any one single project isn't going to constantly require that level of work, and you can't just have him hop project to project within the company since there's a learning curve each time.

I originally picked up the "programmer productivity varies a lot" meme from one of PG's essays, but have since seen it in industry: http://paulgraham.com/gh.html

If the value a select few brought to a company was > $10m, and this was widely known, they would bid up the price. Of course employers don't have an incentive to pay above market rate, that's almost a tautology. That is what market rate means. However, if there was so much value to be had, market rate would rise.

You seem to have misunderstood what I was talking about. I didn't contravene you at all.

> I have a hard time believing that for programmers. 10x maybe, not 100x.

Peopleware claims 10x.

You are incorrectly assuming that pay is fair. I can easily believe that 100x number. Especially considering how when a mediocre programmer under-performs he is usually augmented by other mediocre programmers which tends reduce the efficiency even more.

Anyway, Paul Graham wrote a pretty convincing essay about this.

"When was the last time you heard about a software engineer employee making over $1m, let alone $10m?"

Exactly. employees don't make make over $1m, but plenty of founders who sold startups have.

Does that really qualify as 'programmer' productivity though? Being a productive programmer is different from having a good idea and having the business sense to capitalize on it. Sure it may require productive programming to create it, but I would hardly say that 'hyper-productive programming' is at the core of most successful startups.

Years of experience gives you much better information to work with, but you're still using your same old thought processes to...process it. You can offset a lower intelligence with better information, but only to a point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com