Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Couple points - I didn't say there is anything unique or special about being a programmer from a skill perspective. Almost everyone who can graduate from high school can be taught to program, and put together useful applications. I tried to call that out when describing the difference between a day-day CRUD developer and platform developer.

But there is a distinct hierarchy of developers who can, for example, instinctively comprehend pointer-to-pointer data structures, or have walked through and mostly understand AoCP, or heck, can (quickly) write concise elegant code like this: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/bea....

One key difference between programming and teaching/soldiering/policing, is leverage. A single 100x teacher/soldier/police officer is limited in the impact they can have on the world, whereas a single 100x developer can write a platform/system that is used by 100s of millions of people.

View on HN

I'd disagree about the 100x something-other-than-a-coder having a limited impact.

I'd call Florence Nightingale a 100x nurse, or maybe a 10,000x nurse, for the impact she had on the world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale#Statistic...

Now we're talking about heroic icons. There are thousands, or maybe 10s of thousands of 100x developers. There is only one Florence Nightingale, Steve Jobs, Donald Knuth, Michelangelo, Einstein, etc...

You don't need to be a heroic icon to be more valuable than a 100x developer.

The 100x teacher who molds the mind of the kid/teenager/adult who eventually cures cancer is worth more than just about any single 100x developer out there right now, and you'll never know that person's name.

(Yeah, I'm aware there will be multiple different cures for different cancers, the point remains)

It would be interesting to see if any great researcher could tie back their success to a teacher. My suspicion (based on nothing more than gut feeling) is that while a good/great teacher has some impact, that beyond a certain level it's 99.9% the individual and their environment/peers/parents/contacts, rather than any particular teacher.

Another way of saying this from a mercenary monetary point of view is that I don't think investing more than $250K/year on a K-12 teacher makes sense, though you might be able to make an argument that people who teach teachers might have greater leverage.

I certainly agree that the spread in productivity between the best and mediocre seems to be huge in software development compared to most other industries. In fact, I cannot think of another one quite like it off the top of my head.

We do have certain other advantages though. We can create a start-up and potentially make a huge amount of money. This is a realistic possibility for a substantial percentage of good developers. Much fewer people from other industries have that kind of chance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com