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Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

Dude. You're not getting the objection. We're not objecting to the numeric ratios, we're objecting to using those numbers in the first place.

> GDP per capita seems to be a curious way to estimate if a local dev is likely to be productive.

Curious is putting it mildly. :) What is being objected to is your _measure_. Stop using the GDP per capita of an entire country as a proxy for software developer productivity. It's frankly stupid. Anyway GDP per capita using PPP (purchasing power parity) is seen as a fairer comparison. But even GDP per capita by PPP is a stupid metric to compare software developer productivity. I'm sorry for using the word stupid. But it's stupid.

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>Stop using the GDP per capita of an entire country as a proxy for software developer productivity. It's frankly stupid.

Outside of entertainment where software is a direct consumer product, the developer's productivity comes from increased efficiency of use of other productive resources. You can't eat code, but you can eat food that comes from higher production due to better software. So software has a multiplicative effect on existing production. That is, GDP.

Now even added value of entertainment software (games etc) depends on total GDP, because people have to pay with something for that entertainment.

So average developer's productivity IS a function of GDP, with different coefficient depending on the structure of a economy.

A primitive non-mechanized agricultural economy would have a coefficient of near zero because there's almost nothing to automate.

>Anyway GDP per capita using PPP (purchasing power parity) is seen as a fairer comparison.

A fundamentally wrong metric because pay is nominal.

This way of estimating a dev's likely productivity would operate independent of their individual ability, as well as be applicable across all worker categories. For example a dairy farmer in Switzerland earns more than one in Poland because people pay more for milk products in Switzerland compared to Poland.

So why would the GDP per capita of their country be a useful tool in deciding who to hire?

>For example a dairy farmer in Switzerland earns more than one in Poland because people pay more for milk products in Switzerland compared to Poland.

A Swiss farmer is much more productive when measured in currency units, but probably not that much in milk volume.

However as we are talking about salary differences it's money that matters.

>So why would the GDP per capita of their country be a useful tool in deciding who to hire?

Why would it be? In this conceptual model the ability of a developer is how much he multiplies the output of whatever he's working on, but his productivity is the absolute value of added output. How could it be counted otherwise, in what? Lines of code?

If productivity didn't depend on location immigration wouldn't exist.

I guess it depends on the sense in which "productivity" is being used.

A remote dev working for a Bay Area company from Spain can be just as productive for his employer as one located in Los Gatos, CA. However the above method would categorize this dev as "objectively less productive", which seems counter-intuitive...

>However the above method would categorize this dev as "objectively less productive", which seems counter-intuitive...

It wouldn't, it purports to explain the differences in local salaries, or more precisely salaries paid by local entities to on-site developers.

It's true I didn't specify that explicitly in the first comment, along with definition of productivity, so your reading of it was a reasonable understanding. It's a good thing you helped me clarify the intended meaning.

One assumption is that foreign demand (for non-local use) for local on-site developers is small enough to not change the workforce demand significantly. So it won't work for India or other common offshore destination, but it seems to explain pay differences between USA and Spain, Norway and Switzerland reasonably.

In other words, pay differentials are more closely related to locale than to the amount or quality of work produced.

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