3 ms·
Doesn't the result of this argument rest on empirical evidence more than anything? There must be some point at which the salary/talent tradeoff doesn't make se
by scarmig 12y ago
Doesn't the result of this argument rest on empirical evidence more than anything?
There must be some point at which the salary/talent tradeoff doesn't make sense. Take a team of half a dozen developers each with a million dollar salary. They'd be the best of the best, sure, but it's probably not the best deployment of resources.
Alternatively, consider a team of dozen unpaid interns. They're also probably too expensive.
Figuring out the correct mixture of talent and money is a hard problem, and companies are built on getting that right. And although it might be a good ego-stroke to think "expensive awesome programmers provide a lot more value than cheap competent programmers," it needs evidence, and the evidence for it probably varies in different contexts.
- kyllo 12y agoFor sure. The talent/cost relationship is a curve and you want to find an optimum point somewhere in the middle rather than maximize or minimize on one axis only. Exclusively hiring Java devs at below-market salary, as a lot of Fortune 500 companies do, is equivalent to a strategy of minimizing the salary axis while ignoring the talent axis. Meanwhile in my day-to-day experience at work I am perfectly comfortable with making the generalization that "expensive, awesome programmers provide a lot more value than cheap, barely-competent programmers," because I personally have to work with the product of cheap, barely-competent programmers five days a week, so I know what an unmaintainable mess it is.
- taeric 12y agoThere are plenty of worse things to rest on besides empirical evidence. Indeed, it is a shame that empirical evidence is not more heavily weighed, for some of us.