On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 09:53:23AM -0600, Sasha Pachev wrote: > >If you can really find someone who truly provides twice the results of > >a $75k developer (good luck), then it's even better. The HR overhead > >of an employee is an important factor to consider. A $75k-salaried > >employee may be costing the company $150k/yr in total, so two > >$75k-salaried would cost the company $300k/yr. A single $150k-salaried > >employee would cost the company $225k/yr. > > In order to fully take advantage of a $150 K guy, you need to let him work > in an environment where his skills are used properly. It is unlikely that > he would be able to produce twice as much code in the same amount of time. > However, he can come up with a way that solves a particular problem using > 1/10th of the code volume that you would have had to write without him. He > can also write the kind of code that gives you the same performance on > 1/10th of the cost of hardware/software. He can also write the kind of code > that requires only 10% of your support resources to deal with. But you must > give him a chance to do that. If you make him write large volumes of > trivial code, he will be bored and actually be producing less than his less > expensive peers.
Yep. Lines of code per hour or per person is a worse than useless metric! > > I would like to take advantage of the opportunity to offer a suggestion to > all the business decision makers that are reading this. Treat > hardware/software/business supplies/office space/etc as a commodity. Do not > treat people as a commodity. Extra $10K per year spent on a salary is worth > much more in many ways that extra $10K spent on hardware or software > licenses. Amen, bro! However, it is often not an esaily identified savings, so the bean counters cannot measure it. And when you can measure it, it may annoy certain types of management. I remember when I worked at Hughs Air Crash, I had time on my hands, and I wandered about and talked to other engineers about what they were doing (not the sort of thing the Security State encouraged even then). In talking to one engineer, I made several suggestions that ended up saving ~$1 million in hardware costs alone. Management were not amused. -- Charles Curley /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign Looking for fine software \ / Respect for open standards and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email http://www.charlescurley.com / \ No M$ Word docs in email Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB
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