We're talking about risk/reward tradeoffs a lot in this thread. Doing a startup vs. working as an employee is one of these tradeoffs. If you do a startup you'll get paid closer to what you're actually worth, but maybe you don't generate any real wealth and go bust and get paid zero. If you're an employee, you get to hedge that risk against taking a small fraction of the wealth you generate.
For a Wall Street trader on the other hand, this tradeoff seems to not exist.
It does if you trade your own money, and I'm sure that's more lucrative than working as a trader, but it's easier to measure a trader's output I imagine.
Re:For the Love of Money
by dclowd9901 on Sunday January 19, 2014 @11:23PM
(#7087559)
It's not a hard problem at all. We just need a way to measure code against the money it generates/loses. This should actually be a relatively trivial problem to solve. We have static analyzers, funneling metrics and code coverage tools; this just seems like an extension of that.
The trivial conclusion is that starting your own company is how to be accurately rewarded for your work. But that assumes there's no way to better measure employee performance. It seems like measuring it for engineers and programmers is an impossibly hard problem (At least, that's implied from all of the well-run organizations that have given up or failed miserably on quantizing performance over the years.). However, I would like to see some creative attempts at making teams better at this.