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Please add (2004) to the title. Nobody understand and articulates what hackers want better than PG, and its great that he benefits from this via YC. In a way

Please add (2004) to the title. Nobody understand and articulates what hackers want better than PG, and its great that he benefits from this via YC. In a way this is similar to Joel Spolskys view of the world of optimising for programmer hapiness and enjoying business success as a side effect. The genuinely optimal setup for me in terms of work quality and volume would be unrecognizable the average corporate job. For instance, choosing my own working hours and tools would improve my output by 25%.

olalonde 14y ago
Too late to edit, maybe a mod can fix it.
michaelochurch 14y ago
For instance, choosing my own working hours and tools would improve my output by 25%. I'd be surprised if it weren't 250 percent. Corporate environments optimize for responsiveness, not productivity. People talk about programmers being "overpaid", but I think we're underpaid, at least at the top end, and I think we suffer for it in more ways than the obvious one. We work under conditions where we produce at 10% of what is possible. That's because a good engineer's potential ABV (abstract business value) is well into the millions per year, so if we perform at 10 cents on the dollar, we still make a profit for our employers. If our salaries went up 3x, there'd be fewer of us, but we'd probably have a lot more autonomy and better working conditions, because it just wouldn't be economically feasible to put us in noisy offices, give us crappy tools, and have 90 percent of our time get eaten up by maintenance, meetings, bureaucracy, and distraction.
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  Most businesses are incapable of getting millions of dollars of value from a programmer because of the work that they assign them to do. As Paul points out, the biggest potential variation is in deciding what to work on.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    Right, and this is my fundamental issue with the software industry. If we were paid 2 or 3 times as much, we'd be assigned to do higher-impact work. The reason 90% of software engineers are assigned to bullshit is that our compensation is so low that it can make economic sense to put us on the sort of low-impact stuff that companies never have the sense to drop in favor of more ambitious, more interesting projects. Since the 1960s, we've been approaching (but waveringly, with backward motion from 1973 to 2008) what some call the "Singularity", but it's actually a more prosaic shift: a movement from the late industrial era (3-6%/year economic growth) to a technological one where 10%/year (or better) growth is not out of the question. The first sign of it is what I call the convexity switch. The input-output curve of a worker used to be concave, with the A-players producing 120, your B's producing 110, your C's at 100, your D's at 60 and your F's (slackers) at 0. Intimidation-based management and closed allocation (which are performance-middling, bringing down the best and up the worst) made sense in a time where one slacker cancelled out 2-5 A players (relative to the C standard). But we're moving into a different era where that curve is convex: your A's produce 1000, B's produce 250, C's produce 50, and the D's and F's produce virtually nothing. The traditional, mediocrity-oriented management model used by MBA programs, McKinsey, and typical software management doesn't work anymore, and no one (except, perhaps, the leaders of Valve and Github) has any clue what to do. The issue for us is the expectancy-variance trade-off. The effect of "lean" management post-1975 was to make individual managers (and workers) more accountable for local performance, the result being that no one was paying attention to global, company-wide concerns. Everyone started becoming a lot more careerist, job tenures decreased, et cetera. People optimized for local performance and especially for low variance, because underperformance is punished more severely (firing) than high performance is rewarded (usually, small bonuses, if the high performance is noticed at all). Bosses no longer worked for "the company" or were rewarded for abstract contributions that make the whole firm a better place, but instead were measured by their bosses, and on a tight timeframe. It became more about "individual accountability" and less about actual value creation. The results favor low-variance work. In a concave world, this actually works very well, because low variance is observed at the top of the output curve. This means the work is reliable and meets expectations, and the interchangeable parts fit together well with no surprises. But in a convex world, the top of the output curve is more highly variable, so the result of low-variance management strategies is abysmally low bulk output. It doesn't look abysmally low-- software engineers are still contributing $200-400k per year of business value-- but it's terrible in comparison to what would be possible if the allowance for variance were higher.

olalonde 14y ago

Too late to edit, maybe a mod can fix it.

michaelochurch 14y ago

For instance, choosing my own working hours and tools would improve my output by 25%. I'd be surprised if it weren't 250 percent. Corporate environments optimize for responsiveness, not productivity. People talk about programmers being "overpaid", but I think we're underpaid, at least at the top end, and I think we suffer for it in more ways than the obvious one. We work under conditions where we produce at 10% of what is possible. That's because a good engineer's potential ABV (abstract business value) is well into the millions per year, so if we perform at 10 cents on the dollar, we still make a profit for our employers. If our salaries went up 3x, there'd be fewer of us, but we'd probably have a lot more autonomy and better working conditions, because it just wouldn't be economically feasible to put us in noisy offices, give us crappy tools, and have 90 percent of our time get eaten up by maintenance, meetings, bureaucracy, and distraction.

jeremyjh 14y ago
Most businesses are incapable of getting millions of dollars of value from a programmer because of the work that they assign them to do. As Paul points out, the biggest potential variation is in deciding what to work on.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  Right, and this is my fundamental issue with the software industry. If we were paid 2 or 3 times as much, we'd be assigned to do higher-impact work. The reason 90% of software engineers are assigned to bullshit is that our compensation is so low that it can make economic sense to put us on the sort of low-impact stuff that companies never have the sense to drop in favor of more ambitious, more interesting projects. Since the 1960s, we've been approaching (but waveringly, with backward motion from 1973 to 2008) what some call the "Singularity", but it's actually a more prosaic shift: a movement from the late industrial era (3-6%/year economic growth) to a technological one where 10%/year (or better) growth is not out of the question. The first sign of it is what I call the convexity switch. The input-output curve of a worker used to be concave, with the A-players producing 120, your B's producing 110, your C's at 100, your D's at 60 and your F's (slackers) at 0. Intimidation-based management and closed allocation (which are performance-middling, bringing down the best and up the worst) made sense in a time where one slacker cancelled out 2-5 A players (relative to the C standard). But we're moving into a different era where that curve is convex: your A's produce 1000, B's produce 250, C's produce 50, and the D's and F's produce virtually nothing. The traditional, mediocrity-oriented management model used by MBA programs, McKinsey, and typical software management doesn't work anymore, and no one (except, perhaps, the leaders of Valve and Github) has any clue what to do. The issue for us is the expectancy-variance trade-off. The effect of "lean" management post-1975 was to make individual managers (and workers) more accountable for local performance, the result being that no one was paying attention to global, company-wide concerns. Everyone started becoming a lot more careerist, job tenures decreased, et cetera. People optimized for local performance and especially for low variance, because underperformance is punished more severely (firing) than high performance is rewarded (usually, small bonuses, if the high performance is noticed at all). Bosses no longer worked for "the company" or were rewarded for abstract contributions that make the whole firm a better place, but instead were measured by their bosses, and on a tight timeframe. It became more about "individual accountability" and less about actual value creation. The results favor low-variance work. In a concave world, this actually works very well, because low variance is observed at the top of the output curve. This means the work is reliable and meets expectations, and the interchangeable parts fit together well with no surprises. But in a convex world, the top of the output curve is more highly variable, so the result of low-variance management strategies is abysmally low bulk output. It doesn't look abysmally low-- software engineers are still contributing $200-400k per year of business value-- but it's terrible in comparison to what would be possible if the allowance for variance were higher.