With our formula, the job category to compare these people with would be "amazing consultants", not average consultant. In other words, these people are very senior. No?
Seniority does not, in my experience, correlate with productivity. The programmer I most want to hire has the job title "intern", and he will be hired straight into a major tech company at a princely salary. He'll be worth it, too.
I've interviewed enough programmers to know that the average talent level is absurdly low. But there are amazing people out there, at every level of seniority, who do 5 times more work than average, and keep doing it.
If you pay only a "little bit" more than market rates, you'll lose these people late in the hiring process, when they take an offer for 40% more at another company.
Amazing people don't travel in homogeneous pools whose salaries can be averaged out meaningfully. Finding these people is hard enough, finding out what they would get offered down the street is harder yet.
What has being senior got to do with quality of work delivered? Sure experience counts for some thing. But measuring someone's worth by looking number of years on the resume seems to be a bad metric for hiring.
I generally put in twice the effort as a my boss on almost daily basis, I expect to be what he is now in half the time he took to be.
Why not just flatly pay them on the amount of work done, regardless where(location) they work.
Hi rscale don't take this the wrong way but it would take me a couple of hours to do this research (plus I would do it with the consultant, who knows their local market way better than me), and I don't have the time right now...getting flooded with comments here, plus I actually have work to do. :)
