[jsjohnst]

Depends on what the outcome is. If it makes the site 50% more performant on 25% less hardware, pretty easy to swag it. Same if the outcome makes developers on the team able to ship new functionality 20% faster with 33% fewer bugs.

[thecrazyone]

This seems awfully contrived.

Issue 1: It's very difficult to tell if your contribution got 50% improvement in performance because there were 10 other devs pushing in features and bug fixes. This is the attribution problem

Issue 2: This happens over time. It's very unlikely that your 50% improvement happens every year or month. Because, think for your self, this is compounding with large rates. It grows quickly. 1.5x improvement in 6 cycles (months or years) is 10x. This essentially is the time problem

Issue 3: even if you deliver the results you did, in a large company there's a large bureaucracy and no one person has the ability to increase your salary by that much. This is the control problem.

[nightsd01]

The problem with this argument is that programmers don’t work alone in a vacuum. How do you account for the support staff? The recruiter that hired you? The cleaning lady? The DevOps people? And so on.

It’s avtually fairly non-trivial to be able to say with even a modicum of certainty how much value a given developer brings to their company.

[pmiller2]

This is precisely my point! Thank you for getting it and explaining it.

I currently write software used by millions of people. Partly because I’m a backend engineer, I have no real idea how much more the company is making due to my direct efforts. Since they keep paying me, I’m assuming it’s a decent multiple of my carrying cost, but I have no way to measure it.