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I think managers and business decision makers underestimate how much benefit we bring with our unique set of skills. A great developer can fix the codebase wit

by drchiu 5y ago

I think managers and business decision makers underestimate how much benefit we bring with our unique set of skills. A great developer can fix the codebase with a single line of code. A mediocre developer adds hundreds of lines of code to achieve the same thing. It's definitely hard to measure, and requires some level of understanding before it's even possible to properly valuate.

notyourday 5y ago
> I think managers and business decision makers underestimate how much benefit we bring with our unique set of skills. If that were the case, the companies that did not treat every individual engineer as a special and unique snowflake would have been doing badly. They do not. Hence, it can be derived that while the engineers believe that they are unique super special snowflakes, in reality they are more like electricians - totally interchangeable at a given level of skill.
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  Or the value of even a mediocre engineer is high enough that these companies don’t fail. They would’ve done BETTER by keeping better engineers around but they’ll never know that. And in our current economy, the ability to get corrupt deals etc matters more to business success than actually producing things anyway, which further hides the effect of productivity on success.
  - notyourday 5y ago
    That's an argument that a Ferrari and a Civic have a different value if the only goal is just to transport someone 500 meters. They do not.
    - epicureanideal 5y ago
      That’s not what I’m saying. It seems to be a misrepresentation but I assume an honestly mistaken one. A closer analogy would be something like.. these companies are employed to unload cargo on ships from the dock. Some engineers can unload ships very quickly, and some propose using shipping containers and cranes. These are much more efficient. But the unloader companies don’t care, because they know they have the contracts locked up anyway. They are not especially intelligent or ambitious other than in the sense that they have some cleverness in the sneaky sense. The company continues to make money, the managers get their bonuses, and there’s still billions in economic waste happening but nobody with the ability to change it cares.

by drchiu 5y ago

notyourday 5y ago

> I think managers and business decision makers underestimate how much benefit we bring with our unique set of skills. If that were the case, the companies that did not treat every individual engineer as a special and unique snowflake would have been doing badly. They do not. Hence, it can be derived that while the engineers believe that they are unique super special snowflakes, in reality they are more like electricians - totally interchangeable at a given level of skill.

epicureanideal 5y ago
Or the value of even a mediocre engineer is high enough that these companies don’t fail. They would’ve done BETTER by keeping better engineers around but they’ll never know that. And in our current economy, the ability to get corrupt deals etc matters more to business success than actually producing things anyway, which further hides the effect of productivity on success.
- notyourday 5y ago
  That's an argument that a Ferrari and a Civic have a different value if the only goal is just to transport someone 500 meters. They do not.
  - epicureanideal 5y ago
    That’s not what I’m saying. It seems to be a misrepresentation but I assume an honestly mistaken one. A closer analogy would be something like.. these companies are employed to unload cargo on ships from the dock. Some engineers can unload ships very quickly, and some propose using shipping containers and cranes. These are much more efficient. But the unloader companies don’t care, because they know they have the contracts locked up anyway. They are not especially intelligent or ambitious other than in the sense that they have some cleverness in the sneaky sense. The company continues to make money, the managers get their bonuses, and there’s still billions in economic waste happening but nobody with the ability to change it cares.