Hacker News Reader

Comment by Thriptic | Hacker News Reader

Should developers keep their job if they fail to deliver every sprint and miss deadlines? At the end of the day we are all judged by output; it just so happens that output is more easily measured in trucking (ie the status is binary) than in development.

View on HN

People are paid based on what they have the leverage to demand, not based on what's right or wrong.

Regulated taxi fare formulas usually include both time and distance. A mile in a traffic jam will be based on time. Ten miles with no traffic will be based on distance. Why should truckers not get paid for sitting in a traffic jam if cabbies do? It still costs the trucker time that he can't be doing/working something/somewhere else.

Because then they might take excessively long breaks and get paid for not working. It would be extremely difficult to audit time spent working while being plagued by inefficiencies vs time spent messing around. Paying per delivery aligns incentives and is easy to audit. It also incentivizes truckers to push on dock workers to be more efficient which is in the entire supply chain's best interest.

You can make the same argument against paying developers a salary. Ditto on paying managers a salary.

Yes you could which is why you have contractors. However, it turns out that with "creative" work it's a lot harder to implement that payment model without having an incentives problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com