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Comment by task_queue | Hacker News Reader

10x developer is a myth, but a fun one that makes you feel warm and fuzzy if you believe it.

You can negotiate a higher pay with your employer if you excel, the union provides the bottom from which you can negotiate.

Unfortunately, right now, that bottom is below our what our fair market-rate earnings would be.

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I do believe that top developers are 10x as productive as the median. I don't see this as an indication that top developers are particularly good, though; rather, it's a commentary on how awful the median developer is.

10x developer is very rare, but I have worked with guys like that - though of course, this depends on tasks. If task is well defined and bounded by a given tool set and rigid rulesets, etc, 10x cannot really be achieved. On the other hand, if there is just a vision of achieving goal X, and the median developer doesn't even know what tools to start with, an outstanding developer is much more than 10x productive than median.

However, in regular development jobs, I have also seen 0.1x developers, and worse. Even guys who definitely do damage if they are given access to the tools. The variation is huge.

It's not a myth, some developers really do suck that much.

This is exactly what I am thinking. Its not that I believe I am amazing, I just see so much incompetence around me.

> You can negotiate a higher pay with your employer if you excel, the union provides the bottom from which you can negotiate.

I've never heard of a unionized industry that worked this way. Unions negotiate pay for every worker that belongs to the union. The only way to negotiate for higher pay is to quit your unionized job and take another non-unionized job.

I don't know much about how most unions work, but at least TV & movie actors and writers, classical musicians, and professional athletes have unions that work as task_queue describes. It's hard for me to imagine a programmer's union that didn't work this way getting off the ground.

Here's an example: The Screen Actor's Guild.

Matt Damon is a SAG member but he does not get paid scale. Scale is a minimum wage set by the union but if you're a big enough star, you negotiate your own wages.

Depends on the union. Some allow for negotiation, some have a scale which you can work with.

Bonuses and supplementary pay are usually not determined by unions and are up to you to negotiate in this situation.

Evidently this is highly industry-dependent. My experience is in the US auto industry, where all union workers' pay and benefits are fixed by what the union negotiates with the company. (At least, they were when I worked in that industry.)

Pretty much all the unions in industries where there are recognized hyper-elite workers work this way (SAG s mentioned in a sibling comment, most of the major professional sports players unions, etc.)

Most other unions don't work that way.

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