Productivity has zero to do with salary. Case in point: FOSS.

Some of the most productive devs don't get paid by the big corps who make use of their open source projects, hence the constant urging of corps and people to sponsor projects they make money via.

I don't think there's much of a correlation there.

Salary is an indirect and partially useful metric, but one could argue that your ability to self-promote matters more, at least in the USA. I worked at Microsoft and saw that some of the people who made fat stacks of cash, just happened to be at the right place in the right time, or promoted things that looked good, but we’re not good for the company itself.

I made great money running my own businesses, but the vast majority of the programming was by people I hired. I’m a decent talent, but that gave me the ability to hire better ones than me.

what about the $ you generate? im a software developer consultant. we charge by the hour. up front, time and materials, and/or support hours. not too many leaps of logic to see there is a downside to completing a task too quickly or too well

i have to bill my clients and have documented around 3 weeks of development time saved by using LLMs to port other client systems to our system since December. on one hand this means we should probably update our cost estimates, but im not management so for the time ive decided to use the saved time to overdeliver on quality

eventually clients might get wise and not want to overdeliver on quality and we would charge less according to time saved by LLMs. despite a measured increase in "productivity" i would be generating less $ because my overall billable hour % decreases

hopefully overdelivering now reduces tech debt to reduce overhead and introduces new features which can increase our client pipeline to offset the eventual shift in what we charge our clients. thats about all the agency i can find in this situation

It is from a certain point of view. For example at a national level productivity is measured in GDP per hour worked. Even this is problematic - it means you increase productivity by reducing working hours or making low paid workers unemployed.

ON the other hand it makes no sense from some points of view. For example, if you get a pay rise that does not mean you are more productive.

In a vacuum I don’t believe pay alone is a very good indicator. What might be a better one is if someone has a history across their career of delivering working products to spec, doing this across companies and with increasing responsibility. This of course can only be determined after the fact.

Probably not, I took a new job at a significantly reduced pay because it makes me feel better and reduced stress. That fact that I can allow myself to work for less seems to me like I'm more successful.

People doing charity work, work for non-profits or work for public benefit corporations typically have vastly lower wages than those who work in e.g high frequency trading or other capital-adjacent industries. Are you comfortable declaring that the former is always vastly less productive than the latter?

Changing jobs typically brings a higher salary than your previous job. Are you saying that I'm significantly more productive right after changing jobs than right before?

I recently moved from being employed by a company to do software development, to running my own software development company and doing consulting work for others. I can now put in significantly fewer hours, doing the same kind of work (sometimes even on the same projects that I worked on before), and make more money. Am I now significantly more productive? I don't feel more productive, I just learned to charge more for my time.

IMO, your suggestion falls on its own ridiculousness.

Is DB2 Admin more productive than Java dev on the same seniority?

What about countries? In my Poland $25k would be an amazing salary for a senior while in USA fresh grads can earn $80k. Are they more productive?

... at the same time, given same seniority, job and location - I'd be willing to say it wouldn't be a bad heuristic.

Another metric could be time. Do people work less hours?