Under either your (1) or (2) passable programmers contribute to advancement, so Eliezer’s Masters in chemistry guy can (if he learns enough programming to become a programming grunt) help advance the AGI field.
The best way to judge productivity differences is to look at salaries. Would Google be willing to pay Eliezer 50 times more than what it pays its average engineer? I know that managers are often paid more than 50 times what average employees are, but do pure engineers ever get 50 times more? I really don’t know.
no, but not because they’re not worth it. But because of market forces. Engineers are often willing to work for only a few times average salary, even if they are worth ten times more.
A classic article on this phenomena, and also the difference between “lots of average programmers” vs “one or two awesome programmers” is in Joel Spolsky’s article, Hitting the high notes
Carl Shulman,
Under either your (1) or (2) passable programmers contribute to advancement, so Eliezer’s Masters in chemistry guy can (if he learns enough programming to become a programming grunt) help advance the AGI field.
The best way to judge productivity differences is to look at salaries. Would Google be willing to pay Eliezer 50 times more than what it pays its average engineer? I know that managers are often paid more than 50 times what average employees are, but do pure engineers ever get 50 times more? I really don’t know.
no, but not because they’re not worth it. But because of market forces. Engineers are often willing to work for only a few times average salary, even if they are worth ten times more.
A classic article on this phenomena, and also the difference between “lots of average programmers” vs “one or two awesome programmers” is in Joel Spolsky’s article, Hitting the high notes