Why Coder Pay Isn't Proportional To Productivity

theodp writes "John D. Cook takes a stab at explaining why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity. The basic problem, Cook explains, is that extreme programmer productivity may not be obvious. A salesman who sells 10x as much as his peers will be noticed, and compensated accordingly. And if a bricklayer were 10x more productive than his peers this would be obvious too (it doesn't happen). But the best programmers do not write 10x as many lines of code; nor do they work 10x longer hours. Programmers are most effective when they avoid writing code. An #252;ber-programmer, Cook explains, is likely to be someone stares quietly into space and then says 'Hmm. I think I've seen something like this before.'"pa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/12/23/1820214/Why-Coder-Pay-Isnt-Proportional-To-Productivity?from=rss"img src="http://developers.slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=09/12/23/1820214"/a/ppa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/09/12/23/1820214/Why-Coder-Pay-Isnt-Proportional-To-Productivity?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HipUwWTMdzXHS3PqTLWQHJ0AnxE/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HipUwWTMdzXHS3PqTLWQHJ0AnxE/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HipUwWTMdzXHS3PqTLWQHJ0AnxE/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/HipUwWTMdzXHS3PqTLWQHJ0AnxE/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/mkaN1WKdlfM" height="1" width="1"/

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