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  Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity

The most productive programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than average programmers. But salaries usually fall within a fairly small range in any company. Even across the entire profession, salaries don’t vary that much. If some programmers are 10x more productive than others, why aren’t they paid 10x as much?Joel Spolsky gave a couple answers to this question in his most recent podcast. First, programmer productivity varies tremendously across the profession, but it may not vary so much within a given company. Someone who is 10x more productive than his colleag...

2,180 0       PROGRAMMER SALARY EFFICIENCY PRODUCTIVITY NOT MATCH


  Taking C Seriously

Dennis Ritchie, a co-creator of Unix and C, passed away a few weeks ago, and was honored with many online tributes this weekend for a Dennis Ritchie Day advocated by Tim O’Reilly.It should hardly be necessary to state the importance of Ritchie’s work. C is the #2 language in use today according to the TIOBE rankings (which, while criticized in some quarters, are at least the best system we currently have for gauging such things). In fact, TIOBE’s preface to the October 2011 rankings predicted that a slow but consistent decline in Java will likely m...

2,822 0       C EFFICIENCY DENNIS RITCHIE MEMORIZATION


  A Python Optimization Anecdote

Hi! I’m Pavel and I interned at Dropbox over the past summer. One of my biggest projects during this internship was optimizing Python for dynamic page generation on the website. By the end of the summer, I optimized many of dropbox.com’s pages to render 5 times faster. This came with a fair share of challenges though, which I’d like to write about today:The ProblemDropbox is a large website with lots of dynamically generated pages. The more pages that are dynamically generated from user input, the bigger the risk becomes for Cross-site scriptingattacks. To prevent thi...

2,574 0       OPTIMIZATION PYTHON EFFICIENCY ANECODATE


  It’s Not China; It’s Efficiency That Is Killing Our Jobs

The majority of wealth is now concentrated at the top of the social ladder. This is particularly true in the US, and the gap is widening every year. This, I believe, is because of efficiency, not China. Today the best ideas can efficiently and quickly propagate worldwide, and everyone can efficiently find them and buy them. This makes the owners of these ideas filthy rich, and those ideas that are not the best, can hardly survive. It’s not just transfer of information that is fast; wealth too is transferred very fast and efficiently.Imagine in the future where we have something like Sta...

2,116 0       JOB EFFICIENCY CHINA OPPORTUNITY WEALTH


  10 Ways to Be a More Productive Web Developer

We could all be more productive. There are many things we can do — some big, some small — that will enhance the way we work and improve the outcomes of our activities.Although I can’t promise that I’ll be able to help you cure all your productivity ailments, I do hope that I can provide you with a few useful, solid tips on streamlining your web development workflow and making every part of the development cycle move quickly and smoothly.Follow each one of these tips and I can almost guarantee you that you’ll save time, be able to create more and/or better wor...

2,262 0       EFFICIENCY API WAYS WEB DEVELOPMENT FRAM


  How GitHub Works: Hours are Bullshit

Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote the seminal analysis of management andefficiency in 1911 with The Principles of Scientific Management. Hetook the first scientific approach towards maximizing efficiency inmanufacturing jobs. Time is money. Faster is better. More hours are better.Hours are bullshitHours are great ways to determine productivity in many industries, but notours. Working in a startup is a much different experience than working in afactory. You can’t throw more time at a problem and expect it to get solved.Code is a creative endeavor. You need to be in the right mindset to crea...

3,197 0       CODE STYLE WORK TIME EFFICIENCY ENFORCEM