Why would we use income as a proxy for productivity, given that a) companies’ pay grades are only half matching each other, b) there exists an open source community?
Now, granted, what this says is “the few most productive developers account for most of the value”, not “the few most competent developers account for most of the value”. But I think it’s reasonable to assume that the two are strongly correlated.
I don’t think that holds either. Say, existence of Windows is a large chunk of value (which enables other software and so on), but Windows is not written competently—e.g. from what we see when it, upon an update, crashes a bunch of computers.
Another intuition I had is that the bulk of programmer-hours is probably experienced-programmer-hours, because, again, novices either quit or quickly become experienced programmers.
What I’m saying is that ‘experienced’ is not precisely equal to ‘competent’; as long as your code works somehow, you are not under large pressure to make it maintainable or even valid for all cases.
Why would we use income as a proxy for productivity, given that
a) companies’ pay grades are only half matching each other,
b) there exists an open source community?
I don’t think that holds either. Say, existence of Windows is a large chunk of value (which enables other software and so on), but Windows is not written competently—e.g. from what we see when it, upon an update, crashes a bunch of computers.
What I’m saying is that ‘experienced’ is not precisely equal to ‘competent’; as long as your code works somehow, you are not under large pressure to make it maintainable or even valid for all cases.