[btilly]

The point that was made was that smart people with potential are cheaper to hire and easy to train. My point is that smart people with potential and training are great, but aren't actually as good as smart people with potential and experience.

The trick is, of course, that smart people with both potential and experience tend to be easy to identify..and very expensive.

[oblique63]

Well yes, but the fact that they are expensive is a byproduct of their rarity (which results in us talking about cheaper engineers), and that can be symptomatic of a system with an efficiency problem. The argument then is about confirming that it is.

[btilly]

Expensive, yes. But expensive compared to value produced?

Every decent programmer has stories of a time they put in 10 hours of work to save a highly paid person 20 hours/month for the rest of time. I say stories because there are many such. On my resume I list a number of cases where I added X millions/year to the bottom line of small-medium companies. It is not a complete list. What value should an efficient market put on a programmer who does that repeatedly?

For those willing to work as an employee in the Los Angeles area, the value the market places is significantly under $200k/year. Now you tell me, is that expensive relative to value?

[oblique63]

Expense wasn't even remotely the issue I was addressing; the expense of such 'experts' makes sense within the scope of our system. It is the rarity that seems out of place.