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A comment on Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity. Parent comment

Re:Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their produ... by scott_s on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @04:03PM (#1012850)
He meant in the class of 10x better than the average programmer, which would include all developers in the world, not just the few you can see.
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Re:Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their produ... by joe_the_user on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @04:13PM (#1012865)
Why would the developers you couldn't see be 10x better than the developers you can see?

Could there be a dark matter halo of great programmers lurking around the world's mediocre-programmer-filled corporate cubicals?

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Re:Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their produ... by scott_s on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @04:14PM (#1012868)
I meant "the developers you can see" to imply the people around you. That's a small sample size, and not representative of the entire world.
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Re:Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their produ... by joe_the_user on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @04:52PM (#1012958)
A small sample size would just imply greater deviation. There's no reason to assume the programmers outside your sample would be x10 better than those in your sample.
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Re:Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their produ... by scott_s on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @05:09PM (#1012989)
That only works when you can assume your sample is representative of the global population. Since people are not evenly distributed according to their abilities, that assumption will not hold.
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Re:Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their produ... by TeHCrAzY on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @08:11PM (#1013174)
But in a generalisation, you have to generalise.
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Re:Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their produ... by rdouble on Wednesday December 23, 2009 @04:50PM (#1012952)
Yes, this is what I meant. I don't know why you got voted down.
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