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The only way I can make sense of your comment is if you think everyone in a team/company is responsible for a roughly equal share of the output, which is not re

The only way I can make sense of your comment is if you think everyone in a team/company is responsible for a roughly equal share of the output, which is not remotely the case. Good developers aren’t sandbagging, they’re carrying a disproportionate amount of their teams’ output. Or they’re doing solo or in pairs what would take entire teams of average contributors. Harder problems will magnify, not compress, the differences between individuals, as while ~everyone can build websites to some degree, not everyone can make a positive contribution of any size to the most hardcore problems.

sfpotter 4y ago
You said it yourself: they're carrying a disproportionate amount of their team's output. If the amount is disproportionate, something is screwed up. I suppose they might not be sandbagging. They could be overqualified and simply not realize that they're capable of doing harder work. Or it could be a breakdown in management. My hope is simply that salaries being transparent will have a regularizing effect on the wildly disparate salaries between careers. Either software engineer salaries should come down or other salaries should come up. Other careers and professions which are (IMO) more valuable to society are experiencing brain drain because of this discrepancy.
- closeparen 4y ago
  Careers like medicine, science, and nonprofits reject the overwhelming majority of job seekers and brutalize their workers precisely because they are extremely oversupplied with labor. We should be doing possible to divert talent away from these fields until there is a tenured professorship for every PhD candidate, medical residents get 8-hour workdays, unpaid internships disappear, etc.
  - sfpotter 4y ago
    If you train as a nurse or a physician's assistant, you will have no trouble getting a job and won't have to go through all the rigmarole associated with becoming a doctor. This is not to say that the AMA isn't a cartel and the situation couldn't be improved. But fixing the situation would likely result in lower salaries for doctors... which would require med school to be cheaper... bit of a Catch-22. Science is oversupplied with labor, but there is absolutely no need for every PhD candidate to have a tenured professorship waiting for them. Better would be to actually fund the sciences by pumping money into national labs while simultaneously creating real teaching stream options at universities and colleges. Could also create more opportunities for people to have careers as research scientists at universities. Hopefully at the same time the number of people languishing in postdocs can be reduced. Ultimately, I don't think the current model of "do it all" professor who is expected to be a rockstar researcher, teacher, and salesperson all at once makes any sense. Also, curious that you didn't mention K-12 teachers. At any rate, I strongly disagree that pulling people away from these careers to build websites will have the kind of positive effect you believe it will. The only way to effect these kinds of changes is through labor organizing. And this will only happen if people are in these jobs because they want to be, or because they're a good option among many.

sfpotter 4y ago

You said it yourself: they're carrying a disproportionate amount of their team's output. If the amount is disproportionate, something is screwed up. I suppose they might not be sandbagging. They could be overqualified and simply not realize that they're capable of doing harder work. Or it could be a breakdown in management. My hope is simply that salaries being transparent will have a regularizing effect on the wildly disparate salaries between careers. Either software engineer salaries should come down or other salaries should come up. Other careers and professions which are (IMO) more valuable to society are experiencing brain drain because of this discrepancy.

closeparen 4y ago
Careers like medicine, science, and nonprofits reject the overwhelming majority of job seekers and brutalize their workers precisely because they are extremely oversupplied with labor. We should be doing possible to divert talent away from these fields until there is a tenured professorship for every PhD candidate, medical residents get 8-hour workdays, unpaid internships disappear, etc.
- sfpotter 4y ago
  If you train as a nurse or a physician's assistant, you will have no trouble getting a job and won't have to go through all the rigmarole associated with becoming a doctor. This is not to say that the AMA isn't a cartel and the situation couldn't be improved. But fixing the situation would likely result in lower salaries for doctors... which would require med school to be cheaper... bit of a Catch-22. Science is oversupplied with labor, but there is absolutely no need for every PhD candidate to have a tenured professorship waiting for them. Better would be to actually fund the sciences by pumping money into national labs while simultaneously creating real teaching stream options at universities and colleges. Could also create more opportunities for people to have careers as research scientists at universities. Hopefully at the same time the number of people languishing in postdocs can be reduced. Ultimately, I don't think the current model of "do it all" professor who is expected to be a rockstar researcher, teacher, and salesperson all at once makes any sense. Also, curious that you didn't mention K-12 teachers. At any rate, I strongly disagree that pulling people away from these careers to build websites will have the kind of positive effect you believe it will. The only way to effect these kinds of changes is through labor organizing. And this will only happen if people are in these jobs because they want to be, or because they're a good option among many.