And that's exactly why the best-paid programmers make a lot more money than the best-paid soccer stars.
Upmodded, of course.
The irony is that this was the thesis that I set out to write about when I started composing my post. And yet I somehow completely lost my train of thought! I guess I had more fun thinking about why, when a soccer star makes $49M a year (which, of course, happens only at the peak of his career), people notice:
... but when a programmer makes an average of $12M a day over 24 years people can manage to forget about him.
(That's Bill Gates, assigning him $0 when Microsoft was founded in 1975 and $101 billion in 1999 when his wealth peaked, and assuming linear growth -- which is obviously wrong, of course; I was just too lazy to do the exponential assumption. He was obviously making money at a much lower rate at first... and a much higher rate later.)
Upmodded, of course.
The irony is that this was the thesis that I set out to write about when I started composing my post. And yet I somehow completely lost my train of thought! I guess I had more fun thinking about why, when a soccer star makes $49M a year (which, of course, happens only at the peak of his career), people notice:
http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/30/best-paid-soccer-biz-soccer...
... but when a programmer makes an average of $12M a day over 24 years people can manage to forget about him.
(That's Bill Gates, assigning him $0 when Microsoft was founded in 1975 and $101 billion in 1999 when his wealth peaked, and assuming linear growth -- which is obviously wrong, of course; I was just too lazy to do the exponential assumption. He was obviously making money at a much lower rate at first... and a much higher rate later.)