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

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