Comment by vilhelm_s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vilhelm_s | Hacker News Reader

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I always was a bit jealous of athletes, ballet dancers, concert pianists, etc, because their expertise is valued so highly. A top-level athlete or ballet dancer will have a complete support staff around them which provides coaching, physical therapy, etc. They will spend most of their time practicing. Imagine how good programmers we could be if we were treated similarly! And of course, elite athletes are well paid in dollars too.

I guess the difference is that the numbers of players on the court is capped. Even if a good player is only (say) 50% more likely to score a goal, having the best player makes the difference between winning and losing, so it's worth paying a lot. And the only way to get a good concert is to spend a huge amount of resources training one particular pianist.

With programming there is no cap. Rather than paying a particularly good programmer 10x as much, you can just hire 10 mediocre programmers, and they will probably get more done. So smallish differences in competence never translate into very large differences in pay or training.

> "With programming there is no cap. Rather than paying a particularly good programmer 10x as much, you can just hire 10 mediocre programmers, and they will probably get more done. So smallish differences in competence never translate into very large differences in pay or training."

That doesn't sound accurate to me. How can 10 mediocre programmers do the work of 1 spectacular programmer? I'm guessing this only applies when we're talking about mundane stuff. Smallish differences in competence translates into large differences in pay/training at the very top of the food chain.

To quote pg:

"This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth-- undergraduates, reporters, politicians-- hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software." - http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

PG is just making stuff up as usual. That "theory" isn't even consistent over a few sentences.

"In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses."

"The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software."

So 95% of programmers make 1% of the good software, but somehow they aren't "sinking"? By comparison what do think happens to the far far majority of players that doesn't get drafted to the NBA?

> That doesn't sound accurate to me. How can 10 mediocre programmers do the work of 1 spectacular programmer? I'm guessing this only applies when we're talking about mundane stuff.

90% of the software that gets developed worldwide is mundane stuff. There's a gazillion mediocre programmer bashing away at a useless app That Revolutionizes How You Connect With Your Friends for every good programmer that hacks at next-gen filesystem driver or a tinier phone.

   Rather than paying a particularly good programmer 10x 
   as much, you can just hire 10 mediocre programmers, 
   and they will probably get more done.

Not in finance; let me tell you from my experience poorly building a bitcoin trading bot over a few weekends, I lost money (play money) from silly off by one mistakes and not having a proper grasp of the statistics I was using. In this type of situation, only a real quant is likely to make money, and the 10 other guys will lose everything in fairly short order. Likewise in crypto: how many average programmers would you have to put in a room to write a secure storage system like Tarsnap?

But, I will agree with you in the general case: CRUD apps. There are lots of features and no one person can quickly crank them out no matter how "x" they are, so in these types of jobs, you really can get much more done with 10 average programmers.

CRUD apps. ... the bane of enterprise programmers and managers everywhere. Yes, they can be banged out quickly, but will they scale? Dear god the problems I've seen when a stupidly architected CRUD app suddenly had hundreds of gigs of data or tens of millions of records in a poorly designed database.

I can only respond to this with two cliches:

1) A team of mediocre performers will never give you anything more than mediocre results.

2) Nine women can't make a baby in one month.

Programming definitely has a cap on both quality and productivity.

And the only way to the maximize the results is with better people. Not more.

The problem is that until about the last two decades, most programming was done in non-competitive fields (internal enterprise IT), so nobody gave much of a fuck about quality or productivity.

Nowadays, most of us work in a context where software is crucial to a company's competitive edge. However, the monetary rewards and social standing of programmers is still very much based on the era of corporate IT (especially outside the SV bubble), and we are only slowly catching up.

Meanwhile the industry is desperately trying to put the genie back into the bottle, first through outsourcing (most of which failed miserably, because good programmers do way more than just code shit), later through wage-theft conspiracies and attempting to lower the barriers for importing cheap foreign programmers.

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