February 4, 2011

One Thing That Programmers Don't Care About

They don't care about money, actually, unless you're screwing up on the other things. If you start to hear complaints about salaries where you never heard them before, that's usually a sign that people aren't really loving their job. If potential new hires just won't back down on their demands fot outlandish salaries, you're probably dealing with a case of people who are thinking, "Well, if it's going to have to suck to go to work, at least I should be getting paid well."

That doesn't mean you can undepay people, because they do care about justice, and they will get infuriated if they find out that different people are getting different salaries for the same work, or that everyone in your shop down the road, and suddenly money will be a big issue. You do have to pay competitively, but all said, of all the things that programmers look at in deciding where to work, as long as the salaries are basically fair, they will be surprisingly low on their list of considerations, and offering high salaries is a suprisingly ineffective tool in overcoming problems like the fact that programmers get 15" monitors and salespeople yell at them all the time and the job involves making nuclear weapons out of baby seals.

(Joel Spolsky, Smart & Gets Things Done, Chapter 3: A Field Guide to Developers)

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