The level of self importance expressed in all of these responses is quite amazing.
Being a developer/engineer is not a particularly unique or hard to acquire skill, it's highly prized only because it's a new domain and there's an imbalance of supply and demand of workers. In the longer run, wages will certainly regress far closer to the median.
What defines productivity will of course be context dependent, but the majority of companies are building products, and it's quite obvious which developers are contributing vs which aren't.
If you're building a novel system that requires a strong theoretical basis for decision making, then you can argue that low output people are potentially valuable. But 99.9% in industry aren't doing this.
And seems many are lacking situational awareness. I could easily rank all the developers in my org with a very high level of accuracy. If you can't you're a poor manager (or branch/subdivision for larger companies).
Seems the vast quantities of butts in seats, do little paid a lot, kind of workers are particularly triggered here. And boy, there are a lot of them.
Way off course. Replace developer with manager and you still get the same problem.
It is all about knowledge and making decisions. Nothing to do with the fact that software development is a new area.
Architecture (buildings) is a very old trade. And yet you would not dare to measure architect's performance by the number of sheets of drawings they produced.
Some architects are sought even if they produce little drawings.
Most architects produce a large number of fairly similar, mundane designs.
Some architects produce small number of well researched an thought through designs that make them sought after in the market and allow them to charge exorbitant prices for their services. They are name that is attached to the design and the owner of the building will tell their guests this and this architect designed my house.
See, it is not all about the quanitity.
Same goes with fashion design, writing books, and so on.
It is called knowledge work.
It is called this because the person uses their individual knowledge to perform the work rather than some kind of reproducible recipe.
A car mechanic that only looks up procedures in the book is one thing.
A car mechanic that has intimate understanding of the car and experience solving various types of problem is a knowledge worker. He might listen to your car's engine sound and go directly to solving the problem and his performance compared to the other guy will be in no way correlated with the amount of time he spent on the problem or number of times he hit his hammer.
Being a developer/engineer is not a particularly unique or hard to acquire skill, it's highly prized only because it's a new domain and there's an imbalance of supply and demand of workers. In the longer run, wages will certainly regress far closer to the median.
What defines productivity will of course be context dependent, but the majority of companies are building products, and it's quite obvious which developers are contributing vs which aren't.
If you're building a novel system that requires a strong theoretical basis for decision making, then you can argue that low output people are potentially valuable. But 99.9% in industry aren't doing this.
And seems many are lacking situational awareness. I could easily rank all the developers in my org with a very high level of accuracy. If you can't you're a poor manager (or branch/subdivision for larger companies).
Seems the vast quantities of butts in seats, do little paid a lot, kind of workers are particularly triggered here. And boy, there are a lot of them.