JG etc.

Paul Graham has released another essay from his book Hackers and Painters.

A great read on the difference between money and wealth, the economic model and ideology of a programmer, and how a startup  is literally a lifetime of work bundled into 4 years of stress.

Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Insteadof working at a low intensity for forty years, you work ashard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially wellin technology, where you earn a premium for working fast.

Value of a good hacker.

Here is a brief sketch of the economic proposition. If you’rea good hacker in your mid twenties, you canget a job paying about $80,000 per year. So on average such a hacker must beable to do at least $80,000 worth of work per year for the company just to break even. You could probablywork twice as many hours as a corporate employee, and ifyou focus you can probably get three times as much done inan hour. [1]You should get another multiple of two, atleast, by eliminating the drag of the pointy-haired middlemanager who would be your boss in a big company.Then there is one more multiple: how much smarter are youthan your job description expects you to be?Suppose another multiple of three. Combine all these multipliers, and I’mclaiming you could be 36 times more productive than you’re expected to be in a random corporatejob. [2] If a fairly good hacker is worth $80,000 a year at a big company, then a smarthacker working very hard without any corporatebullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about$3 million a year…………….

At Viaweb we had one programmer who was a sort of monster of productivity. I remember watching what he did one long day and estimating thathe had added several hundred thousand dollarsto the market value of the company. A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks.A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero oreven negative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs).