Programers and Designers
The romantic image of an über-programmer is someone who fires up Emacs, types like a machine gun, and delivers a flawless final product from scratch. A more accurate image would be someone who stares quietly into space for a few minutes and then says “Hmm. I think I’ve seen something like this before.”
via johndcook.com
This is a snippet from a short and interesting piece on why programmers are not payed biased on productivity. I think he raises some interesting points and I think this snippet is sort of the key to it. Interestingly I think that this kind of situation applies to designers too. Good design is often about building your own kind of efficiency out of awareness of design in general.
What do you think?
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design,
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productivity,
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Thanks for the link.
ReplyDeleteI think you could make an even broader arguement that salaried employees are not paid according to their productivity. Salary and productivity tend to rise and fall together, but not necessarily, and not proportionately even when they do go together.
You have to be an entrepreneur to be paid according to your productivity. You could think of the amount a productive salaried worker is underpaid as a trade-off for not having to do sales, marketing, accounting etc.
This is true, and perhaps part of the point of this situation is that it generally does not matter, except where discrepancies are large, and when they are large, they work them selves out. As you point out in your original post, if the difference be tween a productive programmer and their colleagues is significant enough they move to a better job or start their own company etc.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if there is some advantage to maintaining this situation, apart from the critical devisions of labour you have mentioned.