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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

＞ There were 7 developers and in 2 months only one was writing code.

I would suppose you were looking at many more signs and metric, but then you say it only took you a few hours, so perhaps not ?

I’d assume that dev wasn’t actually writing alone, and people had to discuss the design, talk with the PO/stakeholder, review the code, eventually QA it, manage the deployments etc. Perhaps that poor soul was doing everything alone…but really ?

I can readily think of a few people in my current company that are absolutely drowned by merge request reviews and technical design work, even as their title is just “developper”. I wouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t written a line in weeks, and perhaps one or two fixes in months. They are absolutely critical and I would laugh so hard if someone buying us just fired them because they couldn’t bother looking at other stuff than code written.

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This is probably an extreme example, but it is no secret that the majority of people employed in an organization actually does barely anything of value. Price's law comes to mind.

I’d argue that’s a separate and more deeply rooted issue.

At some level of abstraction, most of the currently prosperous IT companies could be seen as barely producing anything of value, and our startup culture kinda goes in the same way (purely looking at the rate of success vs failures gives a grim picture regarding the amount of time dedicated to these failures).

We have many justifications for that, but at no point I’d see our field as being hyperfocused on only solely bringing actual value to the world.

PS: that’s not just our field of course, ad business comes right to my mind, but we probably have many other work field with very little ‘value’ when looked from a high enough perspective.

The way I see it, the current ridiculously high salaries of SWE, the easiness of it, how little so many seem to do valuable work, is in a big part due to inefficiencies in the system, due to novelty of SWE and how invisible it is.

In my field, mechanical engineering, we've had centuries of machine making. Margins are usually razor thin.

In software that's not the case. Subscriptions that should cost the customer cents per month or year, are costing 10-100x that. Margins are ridiculously high. But it's all so new and not intuitive, like a physical part, we just pay whatever.

Then the invisibility of code and difficulty of distinguishing from the outside what is well made and what isn't, enables.

In all my years working as MechE I've never seen anyone just slacking off. We're all always being pushed, working. I look some of the stories of SWE and it's ridiculous.

I think many SWE just rationalize their high salary as bringing more value to the world, which imo is not really true.

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