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   Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 10-May-2023 00:59:18 JST Dan Luu

   I often wonder why companies don't pay more in order to hire more productive employees.

   The local Costco has checkout folks who can scan and bag items 2x-5x faster than I get at local grocery stores even when I only have a relatively small number of items, and they do a better job at packing items in to not damage them, are friendlier, etc.

   Because almost no one tries to pay for better employees, the market isn't competitive and these people don't cost 2x let alone 5x.

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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 10-May-2023 00:59:16 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     Of course the dynamic range in productivity of engineers is much higher but, similarly, the market isn't that competitive and you don't have to pay that much more.

     When I worked at a chip startup, we paid ~20% better than public companies (if you wrote off our options). Our 40 person team taped out a CPU in 1 year. Our most famous startup competitor, Transmeta, had ~300 people and took 4 years to tape out, a 30x difference in productivity and why we survived and they lost $1B and went under.

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     Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 10-May-2023 00:59:54 JST Dan Luu

     in reply to

     It's generally considered absurd for startups to compete with public companies on pay, but paying roughly twice as much as our startup competitors (all of whom ended up going under very quickly, with the exception of Transmeta, which managed to drag things out for a while due to the massive amount of money raised and won via lawsuit) and getting 30x the productivity seems obviously worth it?

     The range in productivity is so much larger than the range in pay that this seems like an easy call?

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     Chris Krycho (chriskrycho@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 10-May-2023 00:59:54 JST Chris Krycho

     in reply to

     @danluu In my experience, most managers (up through VPs, and the more so the higher) do not believe in those productivity differences *or* make choices which undercut them, in large part because they ignore things like https://danluu.com/people-matter/ and attempt to treat engineers as interchangeable. And as far as I can tell, when you ignore competencies, domain expertise, etc., and aim for interchangeability, you *do* dramatically reduce productivity wins.

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     mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 10-May-2023 01:00:17 JST mhoye

     in reply to

     @danluu I think the secret answer is "because metrics are applied semiotics, and the semiotic locus of the MBA-as-religion demand that expressions of value are undifferentiable and measured in dollars, a lens through which all other nouns must be incuriously seen, as a matter of doctrine, lest the entire edifice collapse" but it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue and managing people well is hard so we don't talk about it like that much.

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     James Morris (jmorris@social.kernel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 10-May-2023 01:04:27 JST James Morris

     in reply to

     • John Regehr
     @danluu @regehr I think this is more about the culture of the company / team than anything else. Productivity is a side effect of good culture - working conditions, recognition, respect, inclusiveness, overall package, challenging & meaningful work etc. You don’t hire for productivity, you create an environment where everyone can thrive, and productivity will come.
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     John Regehr (regehr@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 10-May-2023 01:04:28 JST John Regehr

     in reply to

     @danluu I imagine everyone would like a reliable way to identify the extremely productive employees from the talent pool, right?