The only people who get paid according to their productivity are the ones that own their own business, individually or collectively (in a partnership). Everyone else is paid "market rate" which is the lowest rate someone else is willing to accept to do the same job, and is able to deliver. These are completely different compensation models.
Untrue, many salaried finance types eat what they kill in bonus comp, even some developers (front office developers or quants) if they're responsible for driving P&L and not just a cost center.
I guess you could argue that they aren't salaried since their bonus compensation is usually significant, often many multiples of their relatively low base salary.
Good point. Having never seen one of those people I have forgot about their existence when writing this post.
To the point consider this - if you are my employer and you pay me performance bonus, do you have some money left for yourself? I imagine some of the value I generate as an employee gets captured by the company, otherwise they wouldn't keep me around, right? Therefore, self-employment is the only way to keep all the value you have created.
If you own the business, why would any rational market participant buy your product or service without expecting it to create more value for them than they paid? Same thing, really.
The issue posed by the original post was that great programmers are not paid proportionally to their output, not whether their employer makes a spread on them.
You're correct though that the closer you get to the money the more value you'll capture. You also take more risk. How many startups have folded where junior engineers made $100k/yr and investors and founders left the endeavor with nothing or a net loss? Depending on your life situation, being more risk-averse and taking the guaranteed paycheck isn't such a bad thing.
