Sooo...how do you measure how good a programmer is? You've got to cut $200,000 from your budget. You can lay off 2 junior programmers, or 1 senior programmer.
How, exactly should management determine whether or not the senior programmer is worth twice what a junior programmer is?
This is not a rhetorical question, and generalities like "keeps the juniors unblocked" are not an answer, unless you can give some objective metric which really tracks that. And even if he "keeps the juniors unblocked"--how can a manager tell whether keeping the juniors unblocked is worth $200,000 a year?
Management doesn't agonize for months of who stays and who goes. The directive comes down from Olympus and they have to be executed quickly so that P.R. can move on to another narrative.
I mean.. thats the whole job for the manager? Through performance reviews and keeping track of the work their team is doing. If the senior is actually "unblocking projects" then it should be apparent.
Project not making progress => senior gets involved => project making progress. Or senior gets involved and some architecture decision gets changed to alleviate some risk.
If the senior is doing this but its a visibility problem, then it may suck but they also need to self-advocate if the manager isn't proactively keeping track of their team(like they are supposed to be getting paid to).
Sure, that's in management's wheelhouse....but really, have you never felt like your contributions to the team were undervalued? Or whether somebody else's contributions were overvalued?
> hey also need to self-advocate if the manager isn't proactively keeping track
Have you ever tried doing this? How did it work for ya? In my experience, its not a good idea to get yourself in a place where for you to be right, management has to be wrong. That's not a fight you are going to win.
Sooo...how do you measure how good a programmer is? You've got to cut $200,000 from your budget. You can lay off 2 junior programmers, or 1 senior programmer.
How, exactly should management determine whether or not the senior programmer is worth twice what a junior programmer is?
This is not a rhetorical question, and generalities like "keeps the juniors unblocked" are not an answer, unless you can give some objective metric which really tracks that. And even if he "keeps the juniors unblocked"--how can a manager tell whether keeping the juniors unblocked is worth $200,000 a year?
Management doesn't agonize for months of who stays and who goes. The directive comes down from Olympus and they have to be executed quickly so that P.R. can move on to another narrative.