Gramming
| Posted by Chill on 25 Dec 2009 at 01:48 pm |
Why programmers and not paid in proportion to their productivity.
System administrators also have a similar, but not as great, disparity. The worst system admins (and there are quite a few of these) actually make things worse. They don’t do backups at all or correctly, don’t understand their systems or important networking concepts, and are generally a plague on the companies that employ them.
Programmers often are truly 10x more productive than the worst producers. For system admins, I’d say the disparity is more like 3-4x, but is definitely there.
Strangely, one of the best ways to be a really productive sys admin is to not change anything unless it absolutely needs to be.
And always have spectacular backups.
Thanks for the link.
Sys admins might be in an even harder situation than programmers. Good sys admins prevent problems, and nobody notices problems that don’t happen. The cowboy who causes problems but fixes them quickly will look more important than the person who prevents the problems from happening in the first place. I wrote a post on that here.
John, my girlfriend and I were talking about that very thing in reference to sys admins. She’s a programmer and I’m a sys admin, so I’ve definitely seen that in action at places I’ve worked.
The “hero” whose servers, network, etc., are always down gets lauded when he gets them back up, but the network and servers that always stay up — well, the person responsible for that is seen as superfluous and is a layoff candidate.