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Here's what I've noticed in my career so far. It's difficult if not impossible to assign an actual concrete value to programmer productivity. This makes it diff

Here's what I've noticed in my career so far. It's difficult if not impossible to assign an actual concrete value to programmer productivity. This makes it difficult to compare programmers side by side and assign a true value to each of them. Some companies rank developers but it's done subjectively. This fuzziness allows businesses to not pay fairly for extreme productivity (and conversely, forces them to pay too much for crappy productivity). Usually at any company there are one or more 10x programmers who do most of the work and a ton of mediocre developers.

Supermancho 4y ago
While I don't agree that it's impossible to assign concrete value, any value suffers from network effects. Gaps in people's skillsets can be made up with someone strong in a gap and another person for another gap and now you have 2 less productive people individually, but they make the group better overall. When you replace 1 guy with 19 (as per another thread), the management is easier as there is less need for focus and more flexibility in hiring/firing, which is worth a lot.