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>The best engineers are worth literally 10x the worst engineers Uh, I'm pretty sure the best employees in any field are worth 10x what the worst employees are,
by itsoktocry 3y ago
>The best engineers are worth literally 10x the worst engineers
Uh, I'm pretty sure the best employees in any field are worth 10x what the worst employees are, whether you're writing code, assembling a car or gutting fish.
The economics of labour suggest unions are most valuable where there's a monopsony buyer of labour. Big Tech might fit that bill, especially when we know they colluded to depress salaries.
- flerchin 3y agoThe best airline pilot lands the plane the same as the worst.
- tartuffe78 3y agoWith a few notable outliers...
- digitalsushi 3y ago99.999% of the time I agree with you.
- rmbyrro 3y agoSure, just the integrity of the plane after landing vary sometimes.
- lnxg33k1 3y agoYeah the best developer uses the same compiler of the worst, guess the difference is not what you do at the end, but how you manage the trip, and how you write code before
- itsoktocry 3y ago>The best airline pilot lands the plane the same as the worst Have you considered there's more to being a pilot than landing the plane?
- flerchin 3y agoPlenty more, but the economic impact to the airline is the same from any individual pilot.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chii 3y agoNot really. The worst pilot only lands once, and never again.
- Ekaros 3y agoNow what qualifies as landing?
- II2II 3y agoCollect a large number of pilots, divide them into two pools based upon their performance (low and high). Which pool do you think will incur more expenses to the airline? Keep in mind that some of those costs range from reducing consumer confidence (poor landings or damaged cargo), to planes requiring more maintenance (increased costs of maintenance, planes taken out of service more often), to planes being put out of commission (regardless of whether everyone walks away or not). A lot of people seem to be measuring value in landings per day, widgets per minute, lines of code per week without acknowledging that the quality of work does have an impact.
- flerchin 3y agoThere's only acceptable piloting and not. There's no pilot that makes the airline 10x more per flight.
- wil421 3y agoThe best airline pilots get the best routes for the best airlines and are mostly retired military. At the other end you have cargo pilots and regional flights that carry a brand of major airline but are operated by a different company. Look at salary differences. https://www.thepilotguys.com/blog/airline-pilot-salary https://www.thepilotguys.com/blog/airline-pilot-salary
- AptExtrapolatio 3y ago>The best airline pilots get the best routes for the best airlines and are mostly retired military. Curious about this. I'd have thought going the civilian route of flight school should put one on equal footing on this regard? Or are you saying that just statistically more long-tenured pilots are retired military?
- flerchin 3y agoIn general, these are due to union rules. The union decides what the compensation is, and it's largely by seniority. The airline makes no more money from retired military pilots than they do from any other pilot.
- frant-hartm 3y agoIf you are on an assembly line and you have 45 s to do your job you either do it, or don't. If you do it fast and wait for 40 s you don't add any value.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>If you are on an assembly line and you have 45 s to do your job you either do it, or don't. If you do it fast and wait for 40 s you don't add any value. Have you worked on an assembly line? I have. You may not add value by doing it faster, but you certainly cause problems if you do it slower.
- bigtechennui 3y agoSo there’s a cap on the maximum value (always doing it on time), and a cap on the minimum value (never doing it). The above poster takes the position that the ratio between the maximum value, and minimum employable value is less than 10.
- mycologos 3y agoI think the distinction is the relationship between the median performer and the 90th percentile performer. The two are very different employees for software development but not on an assembly line. As you point out, there is a difference between the median performer and the 10th percentile performer on an assembly line, but that's not the comparison the parent comment introduced.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>As you point out, there is a difference between the median performer But I didn't say that, and I don't agree. I think the 90th percentile never causes delays on a particular station, while the median may cause a few per hour, and the 10th percentile might delay every 2nd or 3rd cycle. There are tangible costs associated with those levels of performance.
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- pydry 3y agoThis idea crops up so frequently that Ive started calling it the "Apparently Tom Cruise Works in a Factory" fallacy.
- runako 3y agoIs Tom Cruise represented by a union?
- germinalphrase 3y agoThe film industry is highly unionized. At some point in his career, he absolutely was - possibly multiple.
- onion2k 3y agoYes. He's a member of the Screen Actors Guild. He stopped shooting MI:8 in solidarity with the union.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TimPC 3y agoI'm pretty sure there are plenty of fields where the output of your best and worst employees don't differ dramatically. Worst is generally some passable minimum not someone who refuses to do the job entirely. For plenty of assembly line jobs, your worst employee has similar productivity to your best employee because there is no ability to make the assembly line faster for the more productive person. In code on the other hand, your best employee can straight up do things your worst employee can't. The differences are much larger. There is a reason people hire Principal Software Engineers, but most IC roles in other fields don't have the same range of seniorities.
- eaton 3y agoI've been doing software professionally for about thirty years now, and what's interesting to me is that the conversations I had with my grandfather about factory work involved all of the same dynamics. Prototyping new solutions versus consistent reproduction of known solutions? People who only understand their own tasks versus those who have a holistic understanding of the components, the process, and the final product? Troubleshooting unexpected failure states in complex systems and fixing mission-critical problems that can make or break the business, versus checking out when The System Breaks? Conflicts between book-smart college grads and grizzled vets who know how things "really work" under the hood? Those are the stories he told me about working in a factory, and frankly the lessons I learned from him were just as valuable as any "fifteen lessons for software architects" books our industry has produced. Sure — software is unique! So is food, so is metal, so is film, so is concrete… People don't deserve unions because they're 10x workers. People deserve unions because they're workers.
- TimPC 3y agoI think a working model of a technology union would have to work closely to professional sports unions or acting unions that support wide disparities in pay. I think historical tech opposition to unions is people not wanting the idea of a standardized wage and extremely high job security (which acts as a downward force on wages). Many people look for something like the Netflix model where you're expected to move on if you're not producing lots of value, but you get compensated more for it. The thing about having 10x engineers being possible is that everyone thinks they are above 1x and deserve above average pay.
- nordsieck 3y ago> Uh, I'm pretty sure the best employees in any field are worth 10x what the worst employees are, whether you're writing code, assembling a car or gutting fish. I've worked at FedEx as a package handler before. That is absolutely not the case there. The absolutely best employees might be 3x more productive than someone who's mediocre with 2 weeks of experience. When the job is picking up boxes off of a conveyor belt and putting them in trucks, your walking speed is one of the key limiters. And no one can walk 10x faster than someone else. Not for a 6-8 hr shift. Some jobs - especially jobs that involve heavy manual labor - just don't have a wide range between the most and least productive employees.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>Some jobs - especially jobs that involve heavy manual labor - just don't have a wide range between the most and least productive employees. Obviously we're all just throwing around numbers to make a point, this isn't hard data. But I assure you there are zero jobs where there is no difference between the best and worst employees. Zero.
- Kye 3y ago3x seems like a lot in a business that lives or dies on thin margins.
- dartos 3y agoSpecifically in the software development field, a good engineer increases the productivity of all other engineers in a way that allows engineers to increase the productivity of each other in a compounding way. A “10x” engineer is worth a compounding amount more than their peers. I don’t think that holds for every field.
- adrianovaroli 3y agoJorge Luis Borges colleagues at the National Library forced him to go slower because he could catalogue books in a fraction of the time they needed. So yeah, if you're an absolute genius, you don't need a union. Everybody else does. Your common people colleagues do.
- dartos 3y agoYeah, that’s the trade off with many collectivist ideas. They optimize for equality, which necessarily hurts the highest performers (in one way or another) and benefits the lower ones (in many ways) Like anything, it’s a trade off
- jhgfjhgfjhfgjhg 3y agoYou would depress the wages of 10x engineers with unions. Look at teacher unions for an example.
- atmavatar 3y agoActors and athletes don't seem to have that problem despite having unions.
- nonethewiser 3y ago> Uh, I'm pretty sure the best employees in any field are worth 10x what the worst employees are, whether you're writing code, assembling a car or gutting fish. Or presumably anything else (because you said "any field"). But why? It seems like the less skill or expertise something takes the less ability there is to deviate from the average. In which case unions, if most useful for low-skilled labor like OP described, are most useful for industries that tend to outsource their labor to other countries. And thus reduces the need for unions. Seems consistent with the decline of unions in the US.
- shortrounddev2 3y agoJobs aren't all technical skills. You can be the best coder in the world but if you're a colossal asshole you're not going to get put in charge of other people. If you show up to work drunk or high, you're definitely not going to advance.
- nonethewiser 3y agoNever said it was. We're talking about productivity. Being such an asshole that your performance is crippled is baked into that.
- shortrounddev2 3y agoBig tech might, but unlike steelworking or auto manufacturing, the barrier for entry for tech is very low, and so big tech aren't the only employers out there. They're not even the only employers paying high wages (you can get good salaries at startups as well)
- neotrope 3y ago> Uh, I'm pretty sure the best employees in any field are worth 10x what the worst employees are, whether you're writing code, assembling a car or gutting fish. This is a big misconception. The difference is whether 10x talent is more valuable than 1x talent. You could be the worlds best fish gutter, but if you can't gut 10x more fish than the next guy, then your salary is capped and you're wasting your talent. In software, you can be 10x more productive than the next guy.