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> You might find the inverse relationship, unfortunately. High salaries often come with high expectations and low time to develop employees because of your high

> You might find the inverse relationship, unfortunately. High salaries often come with high expectations and low time to develop employees because of your high salary. That's been my experience, and I've worked for a fair number of large and small tech firms. This is surely correct. I just ask myself whether this is just a very different formulation of what zck wrote: > I suspect this is like baseball before Moneyball -- what if you can get people who are undervalued and make them better? If we identify "undervalued" with "salary below market rate", one obtains the statement above: By moneyballing, look for great developers who are paid below market rate (and will thus accept a salary far below the one of "rockstar developers") and hire them.

icelancer 6y ago
>> If we identify "undervalued" with "salary below market rate", one obtains the statement above: By moneyballing, look for great developers who are paid below market rate (and will thus accept a salary far below the one of "rockstar developers") and hire them. Yeah, I don't disagree with this at all. My software architect was writing JCL COBOL full-time before he took this job and has a degree in Computer Science from a no-name private school. He knew nothing of our tech stack, but he was a hard worker and a good culture fit, so I hired him and gave him two months (EDIT: on salary) to teach himself - bought him all the courses, books, and such he could stand. Within 3 weeks he was pushing to our repo.
zck 6y ago
> If we identify "undervalued" with "salary below market rate", one obtains the statement above: By moneyballing, look for great developers who are paid below market rate (and will thus accept a salary far below the one of "rockstar developers") and hire them. This is very close to what I was thinking, but there's a slight difference. I was thinking less about people who are _underpaid_ relative to how well they are performing, and more about people who are _underperforming_ relative to how well they could be. I imagine this to be the most powerful kind of sports scouting -- you look for the people who could do well in the majors, no matter how well they're doing now. It's trivial to say "LeBron James would be a good #1 pick"; it's harder to recognize people like Kurt Warner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Warner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Warner), an NFL quarterback who went undrafted, but was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame. I'm talking about people who have more potential than they're showing.

icelancer 6y ago

>> If we identify "undervalued" with "salary below market rate", one obtains the statement above: By moneyballing, look for great developers who are paid below market rate (and will thus accept a salary far below the one of "rockstar developers") and hire them. Yeah, I don't disagree with this at all. My software architect was writing JCL COBOL full-time before he took this job and has a degree in Computer Science from a no-name private school. He knew nothing of our tech stack, but he was a hard worker and a good culture fit, so I hired him and gave him two months (EDIT: on salary) to teach himself - bought him all the courses, books, and such he could stand. Within 3 weeks he was pushing to our repo.

zck 6y ago

> If we identify "undervalued" with "salary below market rate", one obtains the statement above: By moneyballing, look for great developers who are paid below market rate (and will thus accept a salary far below the one of "rockstar developers") and hire them. This is very close to what I was thinking, but there's a slight difference. I was thinking less about people who are _underpaid_ relative to how well they are performing, and more about people who are _underperforming_ relative to how well they could be. I imagine this to be the most powerful kind of sports scouting -- you look for the people who could do well in the majors, no matter how well they're doing now. It's trivial to say "LeBron James would be a good #1 pick"; it's harder to recognize people like Kurt Warner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Warner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Warner), an NFL quarterback who went undrafted, but was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame. I'm talking about people who have more potential than they're showing.