Quote:
Originally Posted by maxtower
Lowballing just doesn't make sense to me from a business perspective. Yet, so many places do this. The difference in hiring a good programmer vs. an average one is what 20%? That good programmer is going to be 2x as productive. Further, should a company want employees who will jump at the first 10% increase losing all the training and domain knowledge that person has gained over 6 mon-1yr or should they just pay 20% higher now and get a more productive person for a longer tenure?
Programming as a profession seems to be something that non-programmers find hard to measure. Do we compare two developers based on how much code they write? How many bugs they introduce? How Many bugs they fix? How many features/products they contribute to? With that in mind, I think people in management roles really cannot see the difference between 2 developers. It's very hard to objectively measure their contributions. If they cannot see the difference between devs then, imo, they have no reason to pay a competitive salary. Whoever will work for the least amount of money is the one they will keep. Of course, they will only find out later if they made the right decision when the dev that was able to do everything left and his work is now passed off to the cheaper, less capable dev.