The Programmer's Price (2014)
Wow what a golden, glittering, graceful submarine. A lot of firms would pay 10x to have this kind of article written about them.<p>The problem is that while I think some devs are better than others, I&#x27;m not a big fan of the superstar idea. The only area where you can even have indentifiably top performers is in sports, where you have a contest that someone is going to win, and you want to pay up for the guy who is marginally better than the next guy.<p>I don&#x27;t doubt that the Django guy would be useful for writing a Django app. The question is how big is the gap between him and someone who&#x27;s been using Django for a few years, even without contributing PRs to the project. Do the thought experiment in your head of whether you could tell the difference between code written by one guy or another. For instance you are given a load of repos, how big is the set of people who aren&#x27;t the original guy? My guess is you can find quite a few people who can use it properly without being the main guy. That&#x27;s kinda the point of a framework.<p>You couldn&#x27;t do that with sports. If MJ or LeBron had had bags over their heads, you would figure out who they were, the group of maybe-MJs would shrink very rapidly down to a small set, and you would be justified in paying them millions.<p>The other difference with sports is you don&#x27;t have a fixed team size. You found a 10x guy, good for you. Now with the 999 other people you have 1009 people&#x27;s worth of productivity. In a sports team, you absolutely want CR7 or Messi, you aren&#x27;t splitting the pie 1000 ways.<p>Music is similar. There&#x27;s only so much appetite for music in the world, and a band is only a handful of people, so you can pay up for the top people.