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Good Developers Are Cheaper

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Sun, 12/21/2003 - 11:08 — Christoph C. Cemper

Jorgen Thelin points me to this article questioning "What Makes a Good Integration Developer?" ?

Quote:

Over time, a number of statistics have shown that the top developers outperform the average developers (not even talking about the bad ones) by an order of magnitude or so. As it turns out that the top developers do not earn 10 times the average salary, these guys (and girls) are a steal. Every company should then aim to get a hold of these "top quartile" developers, assuming the individuals demonstrate a minimum amount of social behavior.

Of course – as DB noted – you could say "Average developers are expensive" – but that's way to negative, isn't it? :-)

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Mon, 12/22/2003 - 05:26 — DB (not verified)

Good Developers Are Cheaper

Shouldn't this be titled "Bad/Average developers are expensive"

Mon, 12/22/2003 - 12:28 — Sam Newman (not verified)

Good Developers Are Cheaper

Eric Brooks of course covered this in the Mythical Man Month, and the implications when that was published should of been clear (but seem to of been ignored by many!). The problems still relate to finding the good programmers of course. The idea behind the mythical man month was that 2 programmers with similar experience and training could differ in terms of productivity from one another by up to ten times. Experience and qualifications are primarily what CV's are about, and so it follows that CV's are at least partially flawed in terms of establishing the technical competency of potential employees - technical interviews (or even written tests) are a must, but its surprising how many people I talk to have never had one. I would certainly advocate a technical quiz (be it written or online) where the answers can be discussed afterwards.

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