The article makes a number of major mistakes that discredit its whole thesis.
1. My source for the productivity figure is Peopleware. They cite a set of "coding war games" that found a repeatedly measured 10x variation between the best and the worst programmers in their work environment. The productivity difference showed up under a variety of different measurements. There is no vagueness about the measurement techniques or doubt about the figure.
2. The 10x figure was from best to worst, from best to median was (IIRC) 2.6 times.
3. A significant portion of the figure they measured was correlated with environment, and the strongest predictor of performance was the performance of your coworkers. That said their study technique couldn't tell the difference between whether environment attracted the best people, or whether environment caused people to become more productive. (From the point of view of a smart employer there isn't too much difference between those hypotheses.)
4. People accept compensation in many ways, and not all of them involve money. I believe that the better a programmer is, the more apt they are to be willing to trade salary for better work environment, more interesting co-workers, more interesting problems, etc. As a concrete example I have heard anecdotes from many people claiming that people are willing to accept sometimes substantial pay cuts for the privilege of working at Google.
5. Whatever the cause, in the Peopleware study the difference in pay between the top and bottom half of programmers was less than 10%. Furthermore productivity was basically uncorrelated with various factors people look at in the hiring process such as years of experience. That is direct evidence that it is a bad idea to measure productivity by salary.
When you put all of these factors together, you simply can't point to market forces then salaries to discount real performance differences between working programmers.
1. My source for the productivity figure is Peopleware. They cite a set of "coding war games" that found a repeatedly measured 10x variation between the best and the worst programmers in their work environment. The productivity difference showed up under a variety of different measurements. There is no vagueness about the measurement techniques or doubt about the figure.
2. The 10x figure was from best to worst, from best to median was (IIRC) 2.6 times.
3. A significant portion of the figure they measured was correlated with environment, and the strongest predictor of performance was the performance of your coworkers. That said their study technique couldn't tell the difference between whether environment attracted the best people, or whether environment caused people to become more productive. (From the point of view of a smart employer there isn't too much difference between those hypotheses.)
4. People accept compensation in many ways, and not all of them involve money. I believe that the better a programmer is, the more apt they are to be willing to trade salary for better work environment, more interesting co-workers, more interesting problems, etc. As a concrete example I have heard anecdotes from many people claiming that people are willing to accept sometimes substantial pay cuts for the privilege of working at Google.
5. Whatever the cause, in the Peopleware study the difference in pay between the top and bottom half of programmers was less than 10%. Furthermore productivity was basically uncorrelated with various factors people look at in the hiring process such as years of experience. That is direct evidence that it is a bad idea to measure productivity by salary.
When you put all of these factors together, you simply can't point to market forces then salaries to discount real performance differences between working programmers.