3 ms·

My father joined Kodak out of college, in 1951. A classmate who interviewed the same day ended up running the place. My father helped a senior programmer autom

My father joined Kodak out of college, in 1951. A classmate who interviewed the same day ended up running the place. My father helped a senior programmer automate dozens of jobs, chemically testing their film processing plant. For this he was moved to their research labs. In the 1970's he invented the filter used in nearly all digital cameras: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter He retired as Kodak's highest paid employee with no responsibilities for others. He was profoundly uncomfortable telling other people what to do. Some people just aren't cut out for management.

vanderZwan 5y ago
Bryce Bayer is your dad? That's quite the exceptional employee you're talking about then. I recently used his other famous invention (Bayer order indices) to come up with a fast approximation algorithm for blue noise (still working out the kinks of an improved version). https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/pseudo-blue-noise https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/pseudo-blue-noise
q1w2 5y ago
This is like the exception that proves the rule. He was an exceptional specialist. The reality is that there is a big demand for people willing to help direct/manage developers who are not great with their time, and to have some degree of vision and project management skills - with a dispationate outlook on corporate politics. The best people to do that are former/current developers since they know how the sausage is made. Because of this excess demand, and the higher efficiency of having a manager with more managerial experience, pay rates are higher for management than most development. I don't think developers become much more efficient as they get older, since they're often required to learn the newest frameworks (unless they're in a highly specialized field that has tools that last decades), whereas managers become significantly better over decades, and thus can justify higher pay rates.

vanderZwan 5y ago

Bryce Bayer is your dad? That's quite the exceptional employee you're talking about then. I recently used his other famous invention (Bayer order indices) to come up with a fast approximation algorithm for blue noise (still working out the kinks of an improved version). https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/pseudo-blue-noise https://observablehq.com/@jobleonard/pseudo-blue-noise

q1w2 5y ago

This is like the exception that proves the rule. He was an exceptional specialist. The reality is that there is a big demand for people willing to help direct/manage developers who are not great with their time, and to have some degree of vision and project management skills - with a dispationate outlook on corporate politics. The best people to do that are former/current developers since they know how the sausage is made. Because of this excess demand, and the higher efficiency of having a manager with more managerial experience, pay rates are higher for management than most development. I don't think developers become much more efficient as they get older, since they're often required to learn the newest frameworks (unless they're in a highly specialized field that has tools that last decades), whereas managers become significantly better over decades, and thus can justify higher pay rates.