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Should developers be paid by the lines of code they produce?

Thriptic 7y ago
Should developers keep their job if they fail to deliver every sprint and miss deadlines? At the end of the day we are all judged by output; it just so happens that output is more easily measured in trucking (ie the status is binary) than in development.
- ta0987 7y ago
  People are paid based on what they have the leverage to demand, not based on what's right or wrong. Regulated taxi fare formulas usually include both time and distance. A mile in a traffic jam will be based on time. Ten miles with no traffic will be based on distance. Why should truckers not get paid for sitting in a traffic jam if cabbies do? It still costs the trucker time that he can't be doing/working something/somewhere else.
  - Thriptic 7y ago
    Because then they might take excessively long breaks and get paid for not working. It would be extremely difficult to audit time spent working while being plagued by inefficiencies vs time spent messing around. Paying per delivery aligns incentives and is easy to audit. It also incentivizes truckers to push on dock workers to be more efficient which is in the entire supply chain's best interest.
    - noobermin 7y ago
      You can make the same argument against paying developers a salary. Ditto on paying managers a salary.
      - Thriptic 7y ago
        Yes you could which is why you have contractors. However, it turns out that with "creative" work it's a lot harder to implement that payment model without having an incentives problem.
Nasrudith 7y ago
If lines of code were a useful commodity in themselves? Yes it would be reasonable. Now we know that is not the case and any attempt to do so would ens in foregone disaster. The reason not to do things like that is if said metrics can do more harm than good. However freight is pretty commodity by definition. Aside from not doing damage to goods and people, throughput is basically the only things that matter in that context. Employees demanding a "standby base rate" would also be sensible if they were required to wait while lacking work to do.
- noobermin 7y ago
  What about by files of code they produce? Or webpages or assets? I imagine some contractors work this way. Why can't what developers produce be commodified?

Should developers keep their job if they fail to deliver every sprint and miss deadlines? At the end of the day we are all judged by output; it just so happens that output is more easily measured in trucking (ie the status is binary) than in development.

ta0987 7y ago
People are paid based on what they have the leverage to demand, not based on what's right or wrong. Regulated taxi fare formulas usually include both time and distance. A mile in a traffic jam will be based on time. Ten miles with no traffic will be based on distance. Why should truckers not get paid for sitting in a traffic jam if cabbies do? It still costs the trucker time that he can't be doing/working something/somewhere else.
- Thriptic 7y ago
  Because then they might take excessively long breaks and get paid for not working. It would be extremely difficult to audit time spent working while being plagued by inefficiencies vs time spent messing around. Paying per delivery aligns incentives and is easy to audit. It also incentivizes truckers to push on dock workers to be more efficient which is in the entire supply chain's best interest.
  - noobermin 7y ago
    You can make the same argument against paying developers a salary. Ditto on paying managers a salary.
    - Thriptic 7y ago
      Yes you could which is why you have contractors. However, it turns out that with "creative" work it's a lot harder to implement that payment model without having an incentives problem.

Nasrudith 7y ago

If lines of code were a useful commodity in themselves? Yes it would be reasonable. Now we know that is not the case and any attempt to do so would ens in foregone disaster. The reason not to do things like that is if said metrics can do more harm than good. However freight is pretty commodity by definition. Aside from not doing damage to goods and people, throughput is basically the only things that matter in that context. Employees demanding a "standby base rate" would also be sensible if they were required to wait while lacking work to do.

noobermin 7y ago
What about by files of code they produce? Or webpages or assets? I imagine some contractors work this way. Why can't what developers produce be commodified?