Salespeople and Programmers

I'm not sure a team of say 10 devs would come up with a unanimous stack rank of their co-worker's productivity.

From my own experience, everyone would probably agree on #1, #2, and #10, but most people put themselves at #3 and the person they work with most closely at either #4 or #9.

It always bothers me when someone attributes things to "luck". I'm not bothered on the basis of whether or not its true, we'll never know anyway, you can't test luck can you? I'm bothered because it's such a cop out. "Great sales people are just the luckiest salespeople." How much credit should we really give that?

Also, attributing things to luck is an excuse to not be proactive. Whether or not things are 100% about luck, should still entail that we be proactive about increasing our opportunities for such magical devices as luck to occur.

Other than that, I like the author's social reasoning behind his post, it is good to think about when managing your own team.

Performance-based pay for creative work reduces productivity.