Joined September 2013
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Victor Lin

San Francisco
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Hum....

How productive can a waitress be? I mean the very top of waitress in the world , maybe she can be as twice productive as average waitress be, then she is already a superhero.

However, in the software industry, very top engineers can be 10~25 times productive than average engineers be. I am not the one saying this alone, Steve Jobs said this, Peopleware said this, everybody knows this.

And you said, hey, this guy, he can do 10 times productive than others do, but still, he only deserves the same salary as everybody does? The salary is too high?

Think about this, hiring 10 average engineers v.s. hiring 1 top engineer. You know, software development is not like common labor works, you cannot simply improve the performance by adding more people on it. There is communication cost. You cannot team up 10 engineers and hope they can be as productive as the super one be.

Okay, let's lower the standard and do some calculations, assume top engineers are 5 times productive than average ones. Average ones takes 60K salary, and top engineer takes 100K salary. Hiring 5 average engineers costs you 5 * 60 = 300K. Hiring 1 top engineer cost you 100K. Oh, don't forget the communication cost for those 5 engineers. Let the CommunicationPenalty(size=5) be 50%, then you have

((300K / 50%) / 100K) = 6 times C/P

See? This is why high end engineers are so hot, so expensive, but still, they are super cheap from the cost/benefit perspective. Salary too high? Think again. :)

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