Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity (2009)

The subject of this post may be the number one reason for a good programmer to stop being an employee and to start being an independent business person. 2 of my own examples (I have many more, as many of you do too): As a one man IT department, in 15 months I reduced my annual budget from $2.3 million to $600K, cleared up 500 old tickets, and implemented 4 mission critical applications. My reward? A 4% salary increase. (I…

The actual real reason is that most management is just bunch of morons busy optimizing for their own success, and no one worrying about any common sense good of the company. The company downfall is always hiring the first "manager". After that managers will just keep inventing excuses to expand their dominion, until the company is 50% management, there's more people than actual work that needs being done, yet all work grinds to almost complete halt. Even if a given…

The author has not ever worked with the truly 10x more productive programmers. Most people do not get the chance to work with these programmers. They do get paid in proportion to their productivity. There are so many horrible programmers that you can be mediocre and be 10x more productive than the guy next to you. Thus you think you're in the 10x crew. But you really aren't. It's not because you're really that good. It's because the guy next…

That's the problem with being so good that you make it look easy. Everything thinks that it's actually easy, and no one gives you credit for it. 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…