> You might think that programmers are expensive–the salaries of programmers are quite respectable in comparison to other industries. But if this were true, a l

> You might think that programmers are expensive–the salaries of programmers are quite respectable in comparison to other industries. But if this were true, a lot more effort would go into improving programmers’ productivity, in particular in creating better tools. ... > I am immensely impressed with the progress companies like Google or IBM made in playing go, chess, and Jeopardy, but I keep asking myself, why don’t they invest all this effort in programming technology? It seems like Google does invest in programming technology, but a lot of that tech is internal. Google spends an order of magnitude more money on employee productivity than any other job I've worked at. But that's probably because at previous jobs we spent <<1% of salary on tools and didn't have economies of scale.