Why is the programmer's productivity not proportional to their salary?

Original English:Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

The most efficient programmers will be several orders of magnitude more efficient than ordinary programmers. However, in any company, their wages only show a small floating gap. Even in the industry, this gap is not very big. If a programmer is 10 times more efficient than others, why cannot he get 10 times more paid?

Joel Spolsky gave a series of answers to this question in his recent speech. First, the programmer's work efficiency varies widely across the industry, but there is no big gap in a company. If a person is 10 times more efficient than his colleagues, he will basically leave, either go to work with more talented people or start a company. Second, high productivity is not noticed. This article mainly discusses the second situation.

A person's work efficiency is 10 times higher than that of his companions. How can he not be noticed? In some industries, this difference is obvious. A salesperson is 10 times more efficient than his companions, which is easy to see and can also be rewarded accordingly. The sales score is easy to measure. For example, some sales staff may have dozens of times the sales volume of others. A bricklayer is 10 times more efficient than its companions, and it is easy to see that this kind of thing will not happen: the best bricklayer cannot be 10 times faster than a general bricklayer. The production of software cannot be measured as easily as selling or building bricks. The best programmers are not able to write more than 10 times the code, and they are not able to do more than 10 times the work.

Programmers avoid writing code to reflect the highest efficiency. They can realize that the problems people ask them to solve do not need to be solved. They can know that customers do not know what they want. They know where they can reuse or modify to solve the problem. They will cheat customers. However, when they achieve the highest efficiency, no one will say, "Wow! This is 100 times easier than using that stupid method. You should raise your salary ." At most people will say, "This is a good idea !" Then continue to work. It takes a long time for you to discover that some people often show wisdom that saves time and effort. Alternatively, it takes a long time for you to realize that some people do not have any output even though they often work overtime.

A romantic representation of the Super programmer's image is that he turned on the emacs editor and typed the code like a machine gun, develop a software from scratch into a final product without any defects. A more precise description is: He quietly looked at space for a few minutes and said, "Sorry, it seems that he has seen it somewhere before ."