Re:Ask YC: Salary vs. Hourly for the Startup
by jk4930 on Saturday March 15, 2008 @01:21AM
(#137396)
Think of employees as subcontractors. Their basic monthly salaries are your costs of having them on standby to work on your assignments. Then you can (more or less) calculate the value of a unit to your company / project and that's what you pay for it. Roughly speaking. So "unit" won't translate into "work unit" (like LoC and similar quantities) but into "subproject". And so we're talking about capital budgeting. A good hacker can understand and apply this creatively after some good books or courses (or the VC advisors provide the knowledge), 'cause in the end it's just some basic concepts + formulae.
Lines of Code? We've been down that road, and it doesn't work well. Especially if you improve the project by deleting unneeded code - did you just do negative work?
Features? Some features are wildly more work to implement than others.
Bug fixes? Besides not being a sufficient measure of work making new code, making a bug fix the work metric penalizes conscientious programmers who find and fix all their bugs very quickly before they check in, or if they report them then they're wasting time writing about bugs that took less time to fix than they did to write about.
I think in an ideal world programmers should get paid by work units, but I don't think there's a way to measure it that doesn't create more overhead than it is worth. In the end, people get paid by the hour not because it's be best way, but because hours are easy to measure.