Re:We Can All Become Job Creators
by randomdata on Wednesday October 19, 2011 @06:36PM
(#3132443)
A crappy developer will actively damage a project.
A bad farmhand will damage equipment worth far more than most pieces of software, destroy crops and animals, the list goes on and on. I can say from experience in both that farming is significantly more challenging than programming.
Even a small farmer will have several millions of dollars worth of equipment that is easily broken in the wrong hands. Like good programmers, good farmhands can be paid quite well because they bring a lot of value to the business.
If a bad programmer gets into your codebase, it is trivial to revert their work. It is much less trivial to replace a $500,000 combine because of an minor operator mistake.
I think there's a big difference between $5-15/hr illegals used to pick crops seasonally by hand, vs. basically apprentice/permanent party farmhands who would touch a $500k+ piece of machinery.
It's pretty easy to evaluate the work product of a fruit picker in a field, compared to a "knowledge worker".
That's not true at all.
A crappy farm hand might harvest at 1/2 or 1/3 the rate of a great one.
A crappy developer will actively damage a project.
It is simply not possible to increase software development productivity by hiring lots of people who don't know what they're doing.