[jere]

>they may be demotivated from reaching their potential.

Surely you don't think the potential of these highly productive programmers is to spend their days doing general IT, working on call 24/7, and being compensated with below market salary and benefits?

[jblow]

Well, I don't know that I would recommend this particular job. But I do know that the time I learned the most, and became a truly good programmer, was just a couple of years after college, when I worked my ass off doing very hard things that were initially beyond my ability. It was a company I started with a friend from college, and ultimately the company failed, but it was a tremendous learning experience.

Programming skill, at least, is like compound interest. The more you program, the better you will be in the future, which means you will learn faster in the future, etc. At a big company or in an undemanding situation, your pace of learning is pretty slow, being limited by the circumstances around you; and like any compound interest, if you get behind, it becomes pretty hard to catch up to where you would have been.

Whereas in a small-company situation or any situation where you are limited only by what you are physically and mentally capable of doing, you are learning as fast as possible. It is very good.

You could say that the Penny Arcade job is not as good as starting your own startup and working that hard, and maybe that is true; but my company shut down and left me $100k in debt (back in 2000 when $100k was real money!) whereas when you get paid, you are not taking the same risk. Maybe this also means it is psychologically difficult to work as hard. I don't know.