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Why Good Developers Are Not Getting 10 times the Pay

73 points by nsoonhui 18y ago

DaniFong 18y ago
I'm pretty sure this is false. Hackers such as Guido van Rossum or Linus Torvalds or Bill Joy are many orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. Some of the old IBM studies cited in Peopleware show the average programmer writing 3 lines of code a day! PG mentioned that Trevor Blackwell rewrote their entire system in smalltalk in two weeks, which was everything that he and rtm wrote in 6 weeks. That's like an order of magnitude difference.. He and RTM were themselves probably an order of magnitude more productive than their competitors, with fourteen times the number of programmers and a worse product. And since those competitors were actually shipping products, they were probably an order of magnitude more productive than the average programmer working on internal tools at some BigCo, ekeing out 3 lines of buggy, ineffective code per day.
- gaius 18y ago
  I'm not sure that's a valid measure of productivity. In a commercial setting most of the code is actually pretty straightforward, but it might take a day of meetings to agree with everyone that (for example) this is how interest should be calculated on this particular financial instrument. Been there, done that. Also 3 lines of APL are a very different beast to 3 (or even 300) lines of COBOL...
  - DaniFong 18y ago
    Absolutely. The frightening thing is that average programmers on COBOL project seemed to still turn out ~3 lines of COBOL a day.
- lethain 18y ago
  Although I'd agree with the second part (that PG and RTM were exceptionally more productive than the Joe Schmoe the programmer), I don't think the Trevor Blackwell example is a good one. I think it's routine for me, and most anyone, to write a first version of a system over a week or two and keep noticing ways the design could be improved. Over time cruft accumulates--and you continue to notice new problems you didn't anticipate when you first designed--and almost always it is much quicker to rewrite a second version than the first. The 3 lines of code per day metric seems fishy to me, but it seems to be based on systems level projects (lets build a new operating system) rather than making a new PHP photoalbum for Grandma. It would be very interesting to see numbers which broke down LOC/day for different subsets of programming jobs.
  - axod 18y ago
    I agree. The first write of anything is working things out. Feeling your way, experimenting, designing and iterating. A "Complete rewrite" sounds hard, and like a big task, but usually it's a simple operation of copying existing functionality. In my experience it's completely possible to spend 6 months writing version 1, and then completely rewrite it in a week.
    - chollida1 18y ago
      > In my experience it's completely possible to spend 6 months writing version 1, and then completely rewrite it in a week. I'll bet Netscape wished you worked for them in 1997.
      - deleted 18y ago
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      - axod 18y ago
        I think quite often, rewrites are best done by 1 or maybe 2 people. I'm not sure they scale well to more.
- scott_s 18y ago
  What you wrote does not disagree with the author. He comes to the same conclusion: some developers are much more, even an order of magnitude more, productive than others. He doesn't get to his real question until the last few paragraphs, which is why don't we see the same pay disparity with developers that we do with other professions? His answer is that measuring who's better is difficult and unreliable. I admit I was confused, too; since he spends so much time on the issue of are some programmers orders of magnitude better than others, I thought that's what he was questioning. He doesn't get to his real question until the end, and then his answer is weak.
  - DaniFong 18y ago
    The author suggests that programmers vary in talent by reliability, buglessness, extensibility and maintainability. He goes on to suggest that these are hard to measure. "It's not that good developers can churn out 10 times as many features as the bad ones. It's rather that good developers write code that have less bugs, more extensible and more maintainable. These are the things that you can't measure by statistics or figures." I've given a few examples of good developers making systems that are orders of magnitude harder to complete, in the same time. In many cases it's not within the current talents of most programmers to write those systems at all. Another good example is the Quake engines. Additionally, in programming contests or student assignments there are many examples of people completing the same task in vastly different amounts of time. Finally, he states that reliability, buglessness, maintainability and extensibility are things you can measure with statistics, but many people have quantified uptime, maintenance, density-of-bugs, and extension time, to moderate success.
- wheels 18y ago
  Measuring things this way is completely wrong. All lines are not created equal. Finding a bug in 10 million lines of legacy code might take me a week to do a 2 line fix, whereas I have days where I can bang out 2-3k of mindless interface code. Sometimes I spend 2 weeks doing research to write a few hundred lines of code. I find this sort of rhetoric honestly reeks of inexperience. Lines is a horrible metric for measuring productivity. Speed for finishing something isn't a particularly good metric either, since I've met a lot of hackers that can go on a coding binge (myself included) and accomplish as much in a weekend as they could in a couple of normal reasonably productive weeks.
  - DaniFong 18y ago
    IIRC, one of the major results of the Ericcson language studies (see for example http://www.erlang.se/publications/Ulf_Wiger.pdf http://www.erlang.se/publications/Ulf_Wiger.pdf) was that the lines of code metric was more or less constant over projects and across languages. "Comparisons between Ericsson-internal development projects indicate similar line/hour productivity, including all phases of software development, rather independently of which language (Erlang, PLEX, C, C++ or Java) was used. What differentiates the different languages then becomes source code volume." Do you have a better metric? How about skill in solving tough algorithmic problems which haven't been before solved? Often on, for example, TopCoder, the top competitor can solve a set of three problems in 15 - 30 minutes. The median competitor, even in the upper division, solves zero. Some of the problems at only the 'medium-level' in those sets are in fact so difficult that they are given as two-week assignments in university courses, and only a fraction of students can complete it. This doesn't seem like a difference in reliability and bug count, it seems like a difference in kind in both algorithmic ability and productivity.
    - wheels 18y ago
      They're trying to prove a very different point in that study; notably that for developers working on distributed architectures that it's faster to solve most problems with Erlang than C++. That's a very different sort of conclusion than saying that the best programmers write the most code. I think the only reasonable metric is someone's portfolio. You wouldn't pick an architect by how many nails they'd used or a musician by how many notes they'd written. You have to look at what they've actually done. And in fact, that's pretty close to what good hiring is about. You then see if real performance matches up to what's in the portfolio.
- shimon 18y ago
  I believe the studies you are referring to measured 3 lines of shipping code produced per programmer-day. This doesn't mean that Joe the Hacker went to his terminal and only typed three lines; it means that other people re-wrote code, or he spent a lot of time debugging something that was a short fix, or that a lot of programmer time was devoted to projects that were never shipped. I'm not trying to defend mediocre programmers here, but I think you've misinterpreted a study that intentionally combines individual productivity with organizational productivity. * Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the actual study report. If someone can locate it I'd appreciate it.
  - DaniFong 18y ago
    I wasn't about to find the original report either, so I could be mistaken in this way.
- deleted 18y ago
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- gruseom 18y ago
  PG mentioned that Trevor Blackwell rewrote their entire system in smalltalk in two weeks, which was everything that he and rtm wrote in 6 weeks. That's like an order of magnitude difference.. I don't know about that situation, but in general, rewriting a system is much easier than writing it in the first place.
mhb 18y ago
Either managers can tell who is better or not. He says both: It is not that the managers don't know that good developers are 10 times more productive than a bad one. Managers do know; some of them are developers or former developers. and It's not that good developers can churn out 10 times as many features as the bad ones. It's rather that good developers write code that have less bugs, more extensible and more maintainable. These are the things that you can't measure by statistics or figures.
- Goronmon 18y ago
  I think his point is that while managers know that good developers do "exist", it's difficult to be able to label a specific individual as a good programmer.
  - graywh 18y ago
    And it's the lack of this "metric" that keeps the great programmers from making 10x.
    - curiousgeorge 18y ago
      Why do you think that re-writeability matters? People who write code that is difficult to maintain should make more money by virtue of being harder to eliminate. I don't think effective programmers document everything either, but maybe this is an unpopular opinion. What sets really productive people apart in my experience is architecture and domain vision. This is certainly the lesson in the Viaweb example. Without good architecture innovation consists of "feature creep". You've got a good thing when you find yourself with changes that simplify a code base or system while increasing its power. I suspect this is why people who develop their own tools are often seen by others are great programmers, and why Eric Raymond's definition of a hacker is someone who builds their own tools. I'm a worse programmer than a lot of people, but am orders upon orders of magnitude faster than anyone else in my niche domain by virtue of knowing how to do things and leverage existing assets. I assume really good programmers are leveraging their expertise in other areas too. If this is true, I'd argue that what keeps the good people from earning higher multiples is that architecture and vision don't matter in a lot of cases. Companies that innovate less have less need for development characterized by rapid innovation. Systems get developed by spec and implemented by indifferent teams. You budget for the features you want, not the flexibility you need. Innovation matters more to smaller companies, but even there non-technical individuals rarely see the architecture through the interface. Flexibility becomes conspicuous mostly by its absence, as development gets "over budget and behind schedule everywhere".
seano 18y ago
Lampard and Gerrard paid £10,000 a week? They wouldn't get out of bed for that, closer to £150,000.
deleted 18y ago
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pmjordan 18y ago
I've found that with freelancing you can at least get closer to something resembling an efficient market value much more quickly, you just need to build up a reputation of being awesome. ("This guy is expensive but he's totally worth the money." style referrals)
ig1 18y ago
A crap developer doing say inhouse software for a non-tech company might make £20k/year. A top-tier contractor developing for an investment bank or hedge fund could be making £250k+/year.
- gaius 18y ago
  Yes, but his key skill isn't his C++ but his knowledge of financial instruments. Even tho' a Quant spends most of his time programming he's not considered a member of the IT staff.
  - ig1 18y ago
    I'm not talking quants, I'm talking senior architects & technical specialists. Domain knowledge is important in those roles - but domain knowledge is an integral part of being a developer. The standard contract rate for senior front office devs seems to be between 500-800/day, specialized knowledge/skills can easily push that upto 1000-1300/day.
    - smanek 18y ago
      Those numbers actually seem a bit low. Even mediocre programmers bill out at $100+/hr ($800+/day). It isn't unusual for someone great to charge 5x that amount ...
      - ig1 18y ago
        The rates I gave were for GBP not USD.
pchristensen 18y ago
Because there's a disconnect between the value created by good developers and where the value gets realized. It's the same reason why people don't invest in energy efficiency. Without a holistic view, you can't see all of the benefits that get created so you can't weigh it correctly against the costs (which are clear).
hapless 18y ago
It's really very simple: - Bad developers won't work for less than a certain amount. - Good developers cost about the same. - Distinguishing one from the other before hiring is nearly impossible. If you were one of these magical 10x producitity guys, would YOU hold out for the job offer with 10x the normal salary? Are you sitting at home, right now, by the phone?
thras 18y ago
The author doesn't get it. It's not about measuring results. Great programmers don't get compensated in proportion to their contributions for the same reason that mediocre CEOs are far over-compensated for theirs. Programmers have no power over the people who set pay rates while CEOs have a great deal of power. Being in management gives you leverage. Being in a union gives you leverage. Being a replaceable widget -- even a gold-plated widget that is x10 better than the other widgets -- gives you no leverage. I hope I've cleared things up for you. Now go out, throw away any Ayn Rand books that you own, and download something by Machiavelli. You'll learn a lot more about the way that capitalism really works.
- deleted 18y ago
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- helveticaman 18y ago
  Programmers have no power over the people who set pay rates while CEOs have a great deal of power. Being in management gives you leverage. Being in a union gives you leverage. I hadn't thought of this. Personally, I see programmers as workers that should be in small, elite groups, like surgeon wards. OTOH, surgeons have a cartel that programmers do not.
  - gaius 18y ago
    As do actors, where the productivity varies even more widely.
  - thras 18y ago
    Quite right about doctors and lawyers. In fact I was going to mention their professional organizations as an example. Requiring certifications, all for the public good of course, is one of the best ways to inflate wages.
    - kragen 18y ago
      Johnnie Cochrane and celebrity plastic surgeons don't earn 30× as much as other doctors and lawyers because their compensation is set by a guild; if anything, guilds tend to assign scale and frown on those who charge more (and prosecute those who charge less). They earn 30× as much because people are willing to pay 30× as much for their services.
mynameishere 18y ago
In fact, good developers sometimes make an infinite multiple of the pay of bad ones.
- newsycaccount 18y ago
  Not true in the United States; we've had an alternate minimum income for quite a while.
coliveira 18y ago
Being a Brazilian, I have some ideas for a fair comparison between soccer stars and software engineers. I just submitted the article here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=386910 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=386910
- paulgb 18y ago
  I think you meant to paste this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387045 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387045
kurtosis 18y ago
One explanation for extremely large pay packages is that they are the result of a bidding war. If programmers don't get the oversized pay they feel they deserve it's because they haven't manipulated the job market properly or they don't really have the power to manipulate the market. The "top-rank" developers sabotage each other by working for lower pay than they collectively deserve. How could programmers construct a bidding war for their services? One way that borrows from the sports analogy is to work in an industry where there is a winner-take-all payoff structure. While one 10x programmer may be only slightly better than any other 10x programmer, in a winner-take-all business it's worth the trouble to bid higher than one's competitors for such people.
time_management 18y ago
The 10:1 ratio is an oversimplification. In some problem domains and with some languages, it's 25+:1 (or infinity:1); for others, it's only 1.5-2:1. Also, though a project can be accomplished 10x faster and better if given to the right person, it's not the same people who are 10x more productive on every project. Finally, one's position on the scale improves (at least within a given field) with experience, so that the first 3 months in a new area are often less than 25% as useful as the next 3. Mediocre developers are short-term money losers, but some of them (the ones with curiosity and intelligence, whose mediocrity is a result of inexperience) will become great hackers, and thus, money-makers who, if treated well, will stick around for a salary much less than their value to their operation. Mediocre programmers are "overpaid" because this "call option" exists.
KWD 18y ago
What also has to be taken into consideration is the HR department, and their company policies that do not allow for any deviation from the policy. Set pay ranges for a title, inability to promote a person more than once per year, inability to provide an increase in pay greater than 15%, so on and so forth.
jimbokun 18y ago
You could describe YCombinator as a means for rectifying this imbalance. I think the author glances over too lightly the idea of good developers working for equity. A core part of the YC philosophy is that it is much easier to take a great hacker and teach them the business skills they need to succeed, than to take someone with business skills and make them a great hacker. (I'm basing this on something from one of pg's essays, sorry, can't remember which one at the moment.) Based on the kind of output that the average YC team puts out during the program, a 10x multiple over the average corporate programmer's output during the same time is a reasonable estimate. Part of this is because, even if you have a corporate programmer capable of 10x more productivity than his peers, the processes surrounding him likely make it impossible for him to get that much work deployed in that amount of time. And I think that is another important thing to consider. Corporations do not pay developers who are 10x as productive 10x as much because the way they develop and deploy software makes it impossible for them to realize a 10x productivity improvement, in any case. EDIT: Just thought of a possible rebuttal I would like to address. You might compare this to the sports star, and point out that the star is not taking on the risk associated with getting paid in equity. However, an athlete's career is also an extremely high risk endeavor. Just as most startups fail, obviously the vast majority of athletes fail to make a lucrative career out of their athletic prowess. I would venture that the selectivity for an athlete looking for a lucrative contract is much higher than the selectivity for a hacker managing to start a lucrative business.
- umjames 18y ago
  I think it was another pg essay (possibly http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html) which suggests that workplaces have office hours because they can't accurately measure an employee's productivity. So they aren't likely to know where the productivity is really coming from anyway. Even if they know you're 10x as productive as the other developers, they may not reward you so as not to make the other developers jealous or resentful.
johnrob 18y ago
I think there are two reasons for the lack of a 10X pay gap: 1) Large companies don't yield the flexibility for top developers to produce 10X the value of the average. 2) Startups don't have the cash to pay 10X. However, I'll bet there are 10X equity differences.
hxa7241 18y ago
Pay is not proportional to personal performance. For a sporting example, try sprinting: the fastest runners are only 2 or 3 times faster than I am, but might be paid millions. Musicians are not paid proportionately to some independent measure of ability, but to sales. So neither of those example support the contention. The article says the difference is not that good devs produce 10 times as many features. But that contradicts the original research reference, ie. productivity.
pg 18y ago
Sure they do (if they want to), by starting their own companies.
tyohn 18y ago
Think about a real rock star (not a rock star programmer). They play/sell their music to millions of paying fans. Now think about the difference to a band that only plays out in local clubs and might sell a few CDs. That rock star who plays to millions of people might not be as "good" as the local band but they are generating a lot more value. Now think about the programmer who is 10x better than a "not so good" programmer... is the end result of the 10x better programing worth 10x more value in the end? Even if they are generating 10x more value - I think that the value generated by real rock star is 100s or 1000s of times more than the local band. So do "rockstar" programmers create a 100x or 1000x more value than a "not as good programmer" does for a company - great rockstars do, great sport players do, great actors do...
JesseAldridge 18y ago
Measuring developer quality is indeed a hard problem, but I predict it will be solved before too long. Good programmers are a massively undervalued resource. A company that could effectively measure developer value would be able to pay strong developers more while paying weaker developers less. This would allow them get much more value from their salary costs and would give them a huge advantage over the competition. I think a lot of people realize this, so it's only a matter of time before we start seeing solutions.
geebee 18y ago
I've read this a bunch of times, and I'm starting to think that the "10x more productive" meme may be damaging the reputation of top programmers. Not because it's bad to be ten, twenty, or a hundred times more productive, but because it shifts focus away from the real value a top developer can bring, which is creativity. The 10X thing implies that top developers produce the same thing as crappy developers, just faster and to a higher quality standard. Imagine a writer is contracted by Rolling Stone for 2,000 words on a rock band (ie., the plot for Almost Famous, vaguely autobiographical for Cameron Crowe). By the "10x more productive" argument, we'd be most impressed with a young journalist who comes back with a high quality story in less time and at a lower cost. The real issue here, though, isn't the productivity - it's that if you give this assignment to 100 different writers, you'll end up with 100 different stories. Some will be great, some will be fine, some will be boring, some will be incomplete. But while deadlines are important, that's more of a baseline: you need to finish in time, and you need to write competently. Beyond that, as a publisher I'd worry a lot less about the writer's "productivity" and a lot more about the product itself. So a top developer can be someone who gets a well defined project done much more quickly to a high standard, or a top developer can be someone who takes vague notions and emerges with incredible software within a reasonable timeframe and budget. While there's probably some overlap, one isn't necessarily good at the other (in fact, I'd guess there's a negative correlation, mainly because people who would be happy working under one set of circumstances would generally be very unhappy in the other).
- kragen 18y ago
  You have a good point here, and I hadn't thought of it that way before. Somewhat related, it does seem like a major factor in the importance of people's software accomplishments (measured economically or however) is the importance of the problem they were trying to solve. Build an easy-to-use web site builder for Microsoft Windows in 1994? Sell to AOL, retire to Switzerland at 35, spend your spare time mentoring the young, designing prosthetic limbs, writing new operating systems in Python, or whatever floats your boat. (Incidentally, to me, that seems like getting paid 10× as much as the average COBOL cubicle drone who retires at 65.) Build it for NeXTStep instead? Nobody will remember. Hamming's "You and Your Research" makes this point about scientific accomplishments: working on great problems is a sine qua non of scientific greatness. To tie back to your point, when someone has some vague notions about what they need done, the first thing you have to do to make incredible software for them is to figure out what they would think was "incredible" — that is, figure out which problems to solve, and which to postpone. Because if you get that wrong, all the rest of your work is more or less wasted. As Hamming points out, it's not enough for the solution of a problem to be desirable; it also has to be feasible. That clearly involves some risk.
mberrow 18y ago
It is interesting how the trade-offs between the following two desires come into play: [1] "more extensible and more maintainable" (long term) [2] "meets a date with sufficient functionality" (short term) In either case, intolererable bugs make the contribution invalid. The stuff has to "work" for the cheque-writer's definition of "work". A manager setting pay rates has less latitude than people might think. The perception of bean-counters and other upper-management is that programming talent is a commodity that does not vary as much as it truly does. Even if they were to pay a superstar (defined however you like) what they were worth (in term of the bottom line), then they get nervous about having too many of their eggs in one basket. e.g. "Uhhhmm ... how about you get me 4 mediocre programmers instead of that superstar so that if one leaves or gets sick I am still covered". I can tell you that most managers are driven by item [2] above with mostly just lip-service being paid to [1]. The peers of developers are much more slanted to [1]. This is why open source can kick so much butt. Developers actually get to do the right long-term thing. So, in practice, a superstar "date meeter" trumps a "extensibility maven" in a managers (i.e. his bosses) eyes nearly every time.
nihilocrat 18y ago
I always thought programmers were more prestige- or interest-oriented than money-oriented. This would help explain why pay is not as proportional as in other industries. J. Random programmer who works at Do-No-Evil Geek-owned Company works on software that millions of normal people will use, but gets paid 40k, is much better off than J. Random programmer who works for Enterprise Software Factory who gets paid 40k and has to wear a tie and work in a cubicle on software 20 people may really give a crap about. You will see the same skewed numbers at work in the video games industry, where employers know they can pay you barely anything for the right to wear whatever you want to work and work on something cool that people care about.
kqr2 18y ago
I believe Gresham's Law, i.e. the principle that bad money drives out the good, is also applicable here. Employers aren't knowledgeable enough to evaluate the difference between a good and a bad programmer. Consequently, they pay only an average with a small variance. One of the characteristics of a bad programmers is that they will say they are "done" when in fact they aren't or the quality is so poor that the schedule will ultimately slip. Employers are bad at judging internal code quality or correlating bugs with bad programmers. In fact, at my old company, they actually gave bonuses to people who fixed the most bugs -- usally their own. They ended up rewarding programmers who made lots of bugs versus people who had solid code. Fortunately, such a reverse incentive program ended. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
davi 18y ago
Maybe 10x good developers don't get 10x pay because it takes teams to build high impact software, and the probability of anyone getting a team of all 10x good developers in the same room working on the same thing is low. (Assume something like 10x good developers at frequency 1:100 or 1:1000 in the population of all developers.) It's hard for a company to realize the value from a 10x good developer, because their work is averaged with that of their 1x, 2x, 0.5x good teammates. Therefore the 10x good developer isn't worth much more than their more conventionally stellar 2x good colleagues; all he's doing is bumping up the average somewhat. The salary difference he commands is the the amount he bumps up the average. Startups are more easily able to increase the concentration of 10x good developers, and that's where developers can make 10x+ money.
known 18y ago
Why Good Cooks in Restaurants are Not Getting 10 times the Pay...
- kragen 18y ago
  Cooks at Taco Bell and McDonald's in the US make US$5-$10 per hour‚ which is up to a max of maybe US$6000 per year. Emeril Lagasse got paid US$9 million in 2005, apparently. Wolfgang Puck makes quite a bit of money too. According to <http://www.chefschoolreview.com/blog/2006/07/do_chef_salaries_equate_to_influence_power.html> http://www.chefschoolreview.com/blog/2006/07/do_chef_salarie..., which also has a list of top chef salaries, "The average non-celebrity executive chef can earn between $125,000 and $250,000 but, according to foodservice.com, the average annual salary is closer to $60,000." There are some guys I know here in Buenos Aires who run a restaurant in their house a couple of nights a week, charging US$50 a plate for up to 20 people. Even they are getting 10× or 20× the pay of an average restaurant cook, and they only work a couple of days a week!
known 18y ago
Business? It's quite simple. It's other people's money. -- Alexandre Dumas
augustus 18y ago
Actually, I think its supply and demand. Programming skills is not something that is rare like sports skills. For e.g. An extremely good basketball player is a combination of athletic ability, height, work ethic, ball handling skills and so on. Sports executives have less alternatives than Tech executives. The market determines the salaries. Also, sports players and anchors more directly contribute to the revenue. Its really capitalism and is fair.

73 points by nsoonhui 18y ago

I'm pretty sure this is false. Hackers such as Guido van Rossum or Linus Torvalds or Bill Joy are many orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. Some of the old IBM studies cited in Peopleware show the average programmer writing 3 lines of code a day! PG mentioned that Trevor Blackwell rewrote their entire system in smalltalk in two weeks, which was everything that he and rtm wrote in 6 weeks. That's like an order of magnitude difference.. He and RTM were themselves probably an order of magnitude more productive than their competitors, with fourteen times the number of programmers and a worse product. And since those competitors were actually shipping products, they were probably an order of magnitude more productive than the average programmer working on internal tools at some BigCo, ekeing out 3 lines of buggy, ineffective code per day.

gaius 18y ago
I'm not sure that's a valid measure of productivity. In a commercial setting most of the code is actually pretty straightforward, but it might take a day of meetings to agree with everyone that (for example) this is how interest should be calculated on this particular financial instrument. Been there, done that. Also 3 lines of APL are a very different beast to 3 (or even 300) lines of COBOL...
- DaniFong 18y ago
  Absolutely. The frightening thing is that average programmers on COBOL project seemed to still turn out ~3 lines of COBOL a day.
lethain 18y ago
Although I'd agree with the second part (that PG and RTM were exceptionally more productive than the Joe Schmoe the programmer), I don't think the Trevor Blackwell example is a good one. I think it's routine for me, and most anyone, to write a first version of a system over a week or two and keep noticing ways the design could be improved. Over time cruft accumulates--and you continue to notice new problems you didn't anticipate when you first designed--and almost always it is much quicker to rewrite a second version than the first. The 3 lines of code per day metric seems fishy to me, but it seems to be based on systems level projects (lets build a new operating system) rather than making a new PHP photoalbum for Grandma. It would be very interesting to see numbers which broke down LOC/day for different subsets of programming jobs.
- axod 18y ago
  I agree. The first write of anything is working things out. Feeling your way, experimenting, designing and iterating. A "Complete rewrite" sounds hard, and like a big task, but usually it's a simple operation of copying existing functionality. In my experience it's completely possible to spend 6 months writing version 1, and then completely rewrite it in a week.
  - chollida1 18y ago
    > In my experience it's completely possible to spend 6 months writing version 1, and then completely rewrite it in a week. I'll bet Netscape wished you worked for them in 1997.
    - deleted 18y ago
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    - axod 18y ago
      I think quite often, rewrites are best done by 1 or maybe 2 people. I'm not sure they scale well to more.
scott_s 18y ago
What you wrote does not disagree with the author. He comes to the same conclusion: some developers are much more, even an order of magnitude more, productive than others. He doesn't get to his real question until the last few paragraphs, which is why don't we see the same pay disparity with developers that we do with other professions? His answer is that measuring who's better is difficult and unreliable. I admit I was confused, too; since he spends so much time on the issue of are some programmers orders of magnitude better than others, I thought that's what he was questioning. He doesn't get to his real question until the end, and then his answer is weak.
- DaniFong 18y ago
  The author suggests that programmers vary in talent by reliability, buglessness, extensibility and maintainability. He goes on to suggest that these are hard to measure. "It's not that good developers can churn out 10 times as many features as the bad ones. It's rather that good developers write code that have less bugs, more extensible and more maintainable. These are the things that you can't measure by statistics or figures." I've given a few examples of good developers making systems that are orders of magnitude harder to complete, in the same time. In many cases it's not within the current talents of most programmers to write those systems at all. Another good example is the Quake engines. Additionally, in programming contests or student assignments there are many examples of people completing the same task in vastly different amounts of time. Finally, he states that reliability, buglessness, maintainability and extensibility are things you can measure with statistics, but many people have quantified uptime, maintenance, density-of-bugs, and extension time, to moderate success.
wheels 18y ago
Measuring things this way is completely wrong. All lines are not created equal. Finding a bug in 10 million lines of legacy code might take me a week to do a 2 line fix, whereas I have days where I can bang out 2-3k of mindless interface code. Sometimes I spend 2 weeks doing research to write a few hundred lines of code. I find this sort of rhetoric honestly reeks of inexperience. Lines is a horrible metric for measuring productivity. Speed for finishing something isn't a particularly good metric either, since I've met a lot of hackers that can go on a coding binge (myself included) and accomplish as much in a weekend as they could in a couple of normal reasonably productive weeks.
- DaniFong 18y ago
  IIRC, one of the major results of the Ericcson language studies (see for example http://www.erlang.se/publications/Ulf_Wiger.pdf http://www.erlang.se/publications/Ulf_Wiger.pdf) was that the lines of code metric was more or less constant over projects and across languages. "Comparisons between Ericsson-internal development projects indicate similar line/hour productivity, including all phases of software development, rather independently of which language (Erlang, PLEX, C, C++ or Java) was used. What differentiates the different languages then becomes source code volume." Do you have a better metric? How about skill in solving tough algorithmic problems which haven't been before solved? Often on, for example, TopCoder, the top competitor can solve a set of three problems in 15 - 30 minutes. The median competitor, even in the upper division, solves zero. Some of the problems at only the 'medium-level' in those sets are in fact so difficult that they are given as two-week assignments in university courses, and only a fraction of students can complete it. This doesn't seem like a difference in reliability and bug count, it seems like a difference in kind in both algorithmic ability and productivity.
  - wheels 18y ago
    They're trying to prove a very different point in that study; notably that for developers working on distributed architectures that it's faster to solve most problems with Erlang than C++. That's a very different sort of conclusion than saying that the best programmers write the most code. I think the only reasonable metric is someone's portfolio. You wouldn't pick an architect by how many nails they'd used or a musician by how many notes they'd written. You have to look at what they've actually done. And in fact, that's pretty close to what good hiring is about. You then see if real performance matches up to what's in the portfolio.
shimon 18y ago
I believe the studies you are referring to measured 3 lines of shipping code produced per programmer-day. This doesn't mean that Joe the Hacker went to his terminal and only typed three lines; it means that other people re-wrote code, or he spent a lot of time debugging something that was a short fix, or that a lot of programmer time was devoted to projects that were never shipped. I'm not trying to defend mediocre programmers here, but I think you've misinterpreted a study that intentionally combines individual productivity with organizational productivity. * Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the actual study report. If someone can locate it I'd appreciate it.
- DaniFong 18y ago
  I wasn't about to find the original report either, so I could be mistaken in this way.
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gruseom 18y ago
PG mentioned that Trevor Blackwell rewrote their entire system in smalltalk in two weeks, which was everything that he and rtm wrote in 6 weeks. That's like an order of magnitude difference.. I don't know about that situation, but in general, rewriting a system is much easier than writing it in the first place.

mhb 18y ago

Either managers can tell who is better or not. He says both: It is not that the managers don't know that good developers are 10 times more productive than a bad one. Managers do know; some of them are developers or former developers. and It's not that good developers can churn out 10 times as many features as the bad ones. It's rather that good developers write code that have less bugs, more extensible and more maintainable. These are the things that you can't measure by statistics or figures.

Goronmon 18y ago
I think his point is that while managers know that good developers do "exist", it's difficult to be able to label a specific individual as a good programmer.
- graywh 18y ago
  And it's the lack of this "metric" that keeps the great programmers from making 10x.
  - curiousgeorge 18y ago
    Why do you think that re-writeability matters? People who write code that is difficult to maintain should make more money by virtue of being harder to eliminate. I don't think effective programmers document everything either, but maybe this is an unpopular opinion. What sets really productive people apart in my experience is architecture and domain vision. This is certainly the lesson in the Viaweb example. Without good architecture innovation consists of "feature creep". You've got a good thing when you find yourself with changes that simplify a code base or system while increasing its power. I suspect this is why people who develop their own tools are often seen by others are great programmers, and why Eric Raymond's definition of a hacker is someone who builds their own tools. I'm a worse programmer than a lot of people, but am orders upon orders of magnitude faster than anyone else in my niche domain by virtue of knowing how to do things and leverage existing assets. I assume really good programmers are leveraging their expertise in other areas too. If this is true, I'd argue that what keeps the good people from earning higher multiples is that architecture and vision don't matter in a lot of cases. Companies that innovate less have less need for development characterized by rapid innovation. Systems get developed by spec and implemented by indifferent teams. You budget for the features you want, not the flexibility you need. Innovation matters more to smaller companies, but even there non-technical individuals rarely see the architecture through the interface. Flexibility becomes conspicuous mostly by its absence, as development gets "over budget and behind schedule everywhere".

seano 18y ago

Lampard and Gerrard paid £10,000 a week? They wouldn't get out of bed for that, closer to £150,000.

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pmjordan 18y ago

I've found that with freelancing you can at least get closer to something resembling an efficient market value much more quickly, you just need to build up a reputation of being awesome. ("This guy is expensive but he's totally worth the money." style referrals)

ig1 18y ago

A crap developer doing say inhouse software for a non-tech company might make £20k/year. A top-tier contractor developing for an investment bank or hedge fund could be making £250k+/year.

gaius 18y ago
Yes, but his key skill isn't his C++ but his knowledge of financial instruments. Even tho' a Quant spends most of his time programming he's not considered a member of the IT staff.
- ig1 18y ago
  I'm not talking quants, I'm talking senior architects & technical specialists. Domain knowledge is important in those roles - but domain knowledge is an integral part of being a developer. The standard contract rate for senior front office devs seems to be between 500-800/day, specialized knowledge/skills can easily push that upto 1000-1300/day.
  - smanek 18y ago
    Those numbers actually seem a bit low. Even mediocre programmers bill out at $100+/hr ($800+/day). It isn't unusual for someone great to charge 5x that amount ...
    - ig1 18y ago
      The rates I gave were for GBP not USD.

pchristensen 18y ago

Because there's a disconnect between the value created by good developers and where the value gets realized. It's the same reason why people don't invest in energy efficiency. Without a holistic view, you can't see all of the benefits that get created so you can't weigh it correctly against the costs (which are clear).

hapless 18y ago

It's really very simple: - Bad developers won't work for less than a certain amount. - Good developers cost about the same. - Distinguishing one from the other before hiring is nearly impossible. If you were one of these magical 10x producitity guys, would YOU hold out for the job offer with 10x the normal salary? Are you sitting at home, right now, by the phone?

thras 18y ago

The author doesn't get it. It's not about measuring results. Great programmers don't get compensated in proportion to their contributions for the same reason that mediocre CEOs are far over-compensated for theirs. Programmers have no power over the people who set pay rates while CEOs have a great deal of power. Being in management gives you leverage. Being in a union gives you leverage. Being a replaceable widget -- even a gold-plated widget that is x10 better than the other widgets -- gives you no leverage. I hope I've cleared things up for you. Now go out, throw away any Ayn Rand books that you own, and download something by Machiavelli. You'll learn a lot more about the way that capitalism really works.

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helveticaman 18y ago
Programmers have no power over the people who set pay rates while CEOs have a great deal of power. Being in management gives you leverage. Being in a union gives you leverage. I hadn't thought of this. Personally, I see programmers as workers that should be in small, elite groups, like surgeon wards. OTOH, surgeons have a cartel that programmers do not.
- gaius 18y ago
  As do actors, where the productivity varies even more widely.
- thras 18y ago
  Quite right about doctors and lawyers. In fact I was going to mention their professional organizations as an example. Requiring certifications, all for the public good of course, is one of the best ways to inflate wages.
  - kragen 18y ago
    Johnnie Cochrane and celebrity plastic surgeons don't earn 30× as much as other doctors and lawyers because their compensation is set by a guild; if anything, guilds tend to assign scale and frown on those who charge more (and prosecute those who charge less). They earn 30× as much because people are willing to pay 30× as much for their services.

mynameishere 18y ago

In fact, good developers sometimes make an infinite multiple of the pay of bad ones.

newsycaccount 18y ago
Not true in the United States; we've had an alternate minimum income for quite a while.

coliveira 18y ago

Being a Brazilian, I have some ideas for a fair comparison between soccer stars and software engineers. I just submitted the article here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=386910 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=386910

paulgb 18y ago
I think you meant to paste this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387045 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=387045

kurtosis 18y ago

One explanation for extremely large pay packages is that they are the result of a bidding war. If programmers don't get the oversized pay they feel they deserve it's because they haven't manipulated the job market properly or they don't really have the power to manipulate the market. The "top-rank" developers sabotage each other by working for lower pay than they collectively deserve. How could programmers construct a bidding war for their services? One way that borrows from the sports analogy is to work in an industry where there is a winner-take-all payoff structure. While one 10x programmer may be only slightly better than any other 10x programmer, in a winner-take-all business it's worth the trouble to bid higher than one's competitors for such people.

time_management 18y ago

The 10:1 ratio is an oversimplification. In some problem domains and with some languages, it's 25+:1 (or infinity:1); for others, it's only 1.5-2:1. Also, though a project can be accomplished 10x faster and better if given to the right person, it's not the same people who are 10x more productive on every project. Finally, one's position on the scale improves (at least within a given field) with experience, so that the first 3 months in a new area are often less than 25% as useful as the next 3. Mediocre developers are short-term money losers, but some of them (the ones with curiosity and intelligence, whose mediocrity is a result of inexperience) will become great hackers, and thus, money-makers who, if treated well, will stick around for a salary much less than their value to their operation. Mediocre programmers are "overpaid" because this "call option" exists.

KWD 18y ago

What also has to be taken into consideration is the HR department, and their company policies that do not allow for any deviation from the policy. Set pay ranges for a title, inability to promote a person more than once per year, inability to provide an increase in pay greater than 15%, so on and so forth.

jimbokun 18y ago

You could describe YCombinator as a means for rectifying this imbalance. I think the author glances over too lightly the idea of good developers working for equity. A core part of the YC philosophy is that it is much easier to take a great hacker and teach them the business skills they need to succeed, than to take someone with business skills and make them a great hacker. (I'm basing this on something from one of pg's essays, sorry, can't remember which one at the moment.) Based on the kind of output that the average YC team puts out during the program, a 10x multiple over the average corporate programmer's output during the same time is a reasonable estimate. Part of this is because, even if you have a corporate programmer capable of 10x more productivity than his peers, the processes surrounding him likely make it impossible for him to get that much work deployed in that amount of time. And I think that is another important thing to consider. Corporations do not pay developers who are 10x as productive 10x as much because the way they develop and deploy software makes it impossible for them to realize a 10x productivity improvement, in any case. EDIT: Just thought of a possible rebuttal I would like to address. You might compare this to the sports star, and point out that the star is not taking on the risk associated with getting paid in equity. However, an athlete's career is also an extremely high risk endeavor. Just as most startups fail, obviously the vast majority of athletes fail to make a lucrative career out of their athletic prowess. I would venture that the selectivity for an athlete looking for a lucrative contract is much higher than the selectivity for a hacker managing to start a lucrative business.

umjames 18y ago
I think it was another pg essay (possibly http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html) which suggests that workplaces have office hours because they can't accurately measure an employee's productivity. So they aren't likely to know where the productivity is really coming from anyway. Even if they know you're 10x as productive as the other developers, they may not reward you so as not to make the other developers jealous or resentful.

johnrob 18y ago

I think there are two reasons for the lack of a 10X pay gap: 1) Large companies don't yield the flexibility for top developers to produce 10X the value of the average. 2) Startups don't have the cash to pay 10X. However, I'll bet there are 10X equity differences.

hxa7241 18y ago

Pay is not proportional to personal performance. For a sporting example, try sprinting: the fastest runners are only 2 or 3 times faster than I am, but might be paid millions. Musicians are not paid proportionately to some independent measure of ability, but to sales. So neither of those example support the contention. The article says the difference is not that good devs produce 10 times as many features. But that contradicts the original research reference, ie. productivity.

pg 18y ago

Sure they do (if they want to), by starting their own companies.

tyohn 18y ago

Think about a real rock star (not a rock star programmer). They play/sell their music to millions of paying fans. Now think about the difference to a band that only plays out in local clubs and might sell a few CDs. That rock star who plays to millions of people might not be as "good" as the local band but they are generating a lot more value. Now think about the programmer who is 10x better than a "not so good" programmer... is the end result of the 10x better programing worth 10x more value in the end? Even if they are generating 10x more value - I think that the value generated by real rock star is 100s or 1000s of times more than the local band. So do "rockstar" programmers create a 100x or 1000x more value than a "not as good programmer" does for a company - great rockstars do, great sport players do, great actors do...

JesseAldridge 18y ago

Measuring developer quality is indeed a hard problem, but I predict it will be solved before too long. Good programmers are a massively undervalued resource. A company that could effectively measure developer value would be able to pay strong developers more while paying weaker developers less. This would allow them get much more value from their salary costs and would give them a huge advantage over the competition. I think a lot of people realize this, so it's only a matter of time before we start seeing solutions.

geebee 18y ago

I've read this a bunch of times, and I'm starting to think that the "10x more productive" meme may be damaging the reputation of top programmers. Not because it's bad to be ten, twenty, or a hundred times more productive, but because it shifts focus away from the real value a top developer can bring, which is creativity. The 10X thing implies that top developers produce the same thing as crappy developers, just faster and to a higher quality standard. Imagine a writer is contracted by Rolling Stone for 2,000 words on a rock band (ie., the plot for Almost Famous, vaguely autobiographical for Cameron Crowe). By the "10x more productive" argument, we'd be most impressed with a young journalist who comes back with a high quality story in less time and at a lower cost. The real issue here, though, isn't the productivity - it's that if you give this assignment to 100 different writers, you'll end up with 100 different stories. Some will be great, some will be fine, some will be boring, some will be incomplete. But while deadlines are important, that's more of a baseline: you need to finish in time, and you need to write competently. Beyond that, as a publisher I'd worry a lot less about the writer's "productivity" and a lot more about the product itself. So a top developer can be someone who gets a well defined project done much more quickly to a high standard, or a top developer can be someone who takes vague notions and emerges with incredible software within a reasonable timeframe and budget. While there's probably some overlap, one isn't necessarily good at the other (in fact, I'd guess there's a negative correlation, mainly because people who would be happy working under one set of circumstances would generally be very unhappy in the other).

kragen 18y ago
You have a good point here, and I hadn't thought of it that way before. Somewhat related, it does seem like a major factor in the importance of people's software accomplishments (measured economically or however) is the importance of the problem they were trying to solve. Build an easy-to-use web site builder for Microsoft Windows in 1994? Sell to AOL, retire to Switzerland at 35, spend your spare time mentoring the young, designing prosthetic limbs, writing new operating systems in Python, or whatever floats your boat. (Incidentally, to me, that seems like getting paid 10× as much as the average COBOL cubicle drone who retires at 65.) Build it for NeXTStep instead? Nobody will remember. Hamming's "You and Your Research" makes this point about scientific accomplishments: working on great problems is a sine qua non of scientific greatness. To tie back to your point, when someone has some vague notions about what they need done, the first thing you have to do to make incredible software for them is to figure out what they would think was "incredible" — that is, figure out which problems to solve, and which to postpone. Because if you get that wrong, all the rest of your work is more or less wasted. As Hamming points out, it's not enough for the solution of a problem to be desirable; it also has to be feasible. That clearly involves some risk.

mberrow 18y ago

It is interesting how the trade-offs between the following two desires come into play: [1] "more extensible and more maintainable" (long term) [2] "meets a date with sufficient functionality" (short term) In either case, intolererable bugs make the contribution invalid. The stuff has to "work" for the cheque-writer's definition of "work". A manager setting pay rates has less latitude than people might think. The perception of bean-counters and other upper-management is that programming talent is a commodity that does not vary as much as it truly does. Even if they were to pay a superstar (defined however you like) what they were worth (in term of the bottom line), then they get nervous about having too many of their eggs in one basket. e.g. "Uhhhmm ... how about you get me 4 mediocre programmers instead of that superstar so that if one leaves or gets sick I am still covered". I can tell you that most managers are driven by item [2] above with mostly just lip-service being paid to [1]. The peers of developers are much more slanted to [1]. This is why open source can kick so much butt. Developers actually get to do the right long-term thing. So, in practice, a superstar "date meeter" trumps a "extensibility maven" in a managers (i.e. his bosses) eyes nearly every time.

nihilocrat 18y ago

I always thought programmers were more prestige- or interest-oriented than money-oriented. This would help explain why pay is not as proportional as in other industries. J. Random programmer who works at Do-No-Evil Geek-owned Company works on software that millions of normal people will use, but gets paid 40k, is much better off than J. Random programmer who works for Enterprise Software Factory who gets paid 40k and has to wear a tie and work in a cubicle on software 20 people may really give a crap about. You will see the same skewed numbers at work in the video games industry, where employers know they can pay you barely anything for the right to wear whatever you want to work and work on something cool that people care about.

kqr2 18y ago

I believe Gresham's Law, i.e. the principle that bad money drives out the good, is also applicable here. Employers aren't knowledgeable enough to evaluate the difference between a good and a bad programmer. Consequently, they pay only an average with a small variance. One of the characteristics of a bad programmers is that they will say they are "done" when in fact they aren't or the quality is so poor that the schedule will ultimately slip. Employers are bad at judging internal code quality or correlating bugs with bad programmers. In fact, at my old company, they actually gave bonuses to people who fixed the most bugs -- usally their own. They ended up rewarding programmers who made lots of bugs versus people who had solid code. Fortunately, such a reverse incentive program ended. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law

davi 18y ago

Maybe 10x good developers don't get 10x pay because it takes teams to build high impact software, and the probability of anyone getting a team of all 10x good developers in the same room working on the same thing is low. (Assume something like 10x good developers at frequency 1:100 or 1:1000 in the population of all developers.) It's hard for a company to realize the value from a 10x good developer, because their work is averaged with that of their 1x, 2x, 0.5x good teammates. Therefore the 10x good developer isn't worth much more than their more conventionally stellar 2x good colleagues; all he's doing is bumping up the average somewhat. The salary difference he commands is the the amount he bumps up the average. Startups are more easily able to increase the concentration of 10x good developers, and that's where developers can make 10x+ money.

known 18y ago

Why Good Cooks in Restaurants are Not Getting 10 times the Pay...

kragen 18y ago
Cooks at Taco Bell and McDonald's in the US make US$5-$10 per hour‚ which is up to a max of maybe US$6000 per year. Emeril Lagasse got paid US$9 million in 2005, apparently. Wolfgang Puck makes quite a bit of money too. According to <http://www.chefschoolreview.com/blog/2006/07/do_chef_salaries_equate_to_influence_power.html> http://www.chefschoolreview.com/blog/2006/07/do_chef_salarie..., which also has a list of top chef salaries, "The average non-celebrity executive chef can earn between $125,000 and $250,000 but, according to foodservice.com, the average annual salary is closer to $60,000." There are some guys I know here in Buenos Aires who run a restaurant in their house a couple of nights a week, charging US$50 a plate for up to 20 people. Even they are getting 10× or 20× the pay of an average restaurant cook, and they only work a couple of days a week!

known 18y ago

Business? It's quite simple. It's other people's money. -- Alexandre Dumas

augustus 18y ago

Actually, I think its supply and demand. Programming skills is not something that is rare like sports skills. For e.g. An extremely good basketball player is a combination of athletic ability, height, work ethic, ball handling skills and so on. Sports executives have less alternatives than Tech executives. The market determines the salaries. Also, sports players and anchors more directly contribute to the revenue. Its really capitalism and is fair.