Why Software Is Eating the World

An anonymous reader writes "Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen writes in the Wall Street Journal that software is 'eating the world.' He argues that software's importance to the economy is being underestimated, and will become much more evident in the near future. Quoting: 'But too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying intrinsic value of the best of Silicon Valley's new companies. My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy. More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.'"

Comments

Developers still 2nd class citizens

[digitallife]

And yet developers are still treated like second class citizens in far too many organizations. The fact is that most management simply does not have any appreciation or understanding of good coding practices, instead using short term metrics to try to recognize valuable developers... Such as how little they are willing to work for. Just recently I read a comment here on slashdot from some developer who said his whole team had been working 12-16 hour days for a year and a half with no extra pay... Because it would "secure" their future with the company. They are in for a very sad surprise.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[Cryacin]

The problem is that business values the player who brings home the bear, not those making spears.

The trick is to brand the quality and purpose of your tools to your market, like the sales staff, the operations guys etc as a vital tool to bring home the bear. A very famous tool maker once said "God created all men equal, Col. Colt made them equal".

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[roman_mir]

In early 1920s cars were taking over the world.

Assembly workers were still 2nd class citizens.

--

Those who know "HOW" will always have employment.

Those who know "WHY" will always be employers.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[RogerWilco]

I think the problem is that software developers aren't organized.

I don't just mean something like a labour union. It could also be like the medics, civil engineers and lawyers, with widely regarded exams.

We let ourselves be treated like this.

I think it's because of three reasons:
1) Unlike medics and civil engineers, there usually is no responsibility for failure.
2) Software developers as a whole aren't the most social.
3) Software engineers usually don't have money as their prime motivation.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[billcopc]

As they should be. Once you acknowledge the fact that money is an artificial construct, the only realization is that accountants truly create nothing in the enterprise. They don't produce a saleable asset. They don't offer any services to the clients.

If you run a company without an accountant, the only bad thing that will happen is the tax man will get angry.

If you run a company without software, you have no company.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[jhoegl]

Yes, but the company constantly creates the "all hands on deck" situation to make you work more.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[BoberFett]

You've gotten lucky. There are a lot of horrible shops where it's always crunch time. And usually because of poor decisions by upper management that could have been prevented with a little bit of planning.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[mikael]

Some IT departments bill by the hour. So there is pressure to get some feature implemented as quickly as possible as well as do *exactly* what the customer wants, along with a need to make as few changes as possible to minimize breaking the code. In the short-term this saves costs. In the long-term this makes code unwieldy, monolithic and harder to maintain.

It's strange how we evolved C to C++ to make use of features like inheritance, polymorphism, pointers, templates and design patterns in order to encourage code reuse, then move over to other languages because doing all that design takes up too much time.

Re:Developers still 2nd class citizens

[cartman]

I see I've been modded down to "troll" by pointing out something which nobody could seriously dispute.

Such as how little they are willing to work for. Just recently I read a comment here on slashdot from some developer who said his whole team had been working 12-16 hour days for a year and a half with no extra pay...

That's just ridiculous and silly.

It's extremely easy to find a job as a programmer right now which pays highish wages relative to other jobs, and which doesn't require working 12-16 hour days. Although there is significant unemployment right now, that unemployment is almost entirely among the working class, and among people who used to be employed in construction etc, and among millenials. The unemployment rate among experienced programmers is 4% at present, meaning unemployment in that sector is almost entirely frictional. At my company, for example, we're trying to find qualified people to hire, but it's virtually impossible. In other words, the labor market for programmers is as tight as it's ever been, with the possible exception of the 1999-2000 timeframe.

Whoever is working 12-16 hour days for no additional money, for a year and a half, has made a silly choice, and has done himself harm for no reason whatsoever. He has many other easy alternatives, which he chose not to investigate or pursue.

Of course, there are many people in this economy who lack skills or experience, and who are seriously suffering. But here we're getting complaints from programmers who have careers in a field with 4% unemployment.

One needs only to type "software engineer pay" into google and come up with links like this one which clearly indicate that someone with a Bachelor's degree makes $60k-$120k per year (not including benefits), Or I could type "unemployment sector" and find that the unemployment rate for programmers is half the national average and that: "With an unemployment rate of under 4% in the tech sector, there’s a shortage of qualified technology professionals, TechFlash reports." Or I could type into google a query about how many hours most programmers work, and find from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that: "Most software engineers and programmers work 40 hours a week, but about 15 percent of software engineers and 11 percent of programmers worked more than 50 hours a week in 2008" which obviously means that working 12-16 hour days is rare. All this took about 60 seconds of research, but perhaps the people working 12-16 hour days never bothered to type these things into google?

Part of living in a capitalist economy involves looking at the options available to you and selecting the best one given your circumstances. I know there is always some rare person who says something like: "I paid $45,000 for a $25,000 car, because I didn't even bother to walk across the street to some other dealership to look," but it's rare and signifies nothing other than that some lone person got ripped off.

The odd thing is that there's constant complaining on slashdot among people, who are essentially highly privileged or fortunate workers. Programmers make $60-$120k for a Bachelor's degree and work 40 hours per week (which apparently is average, according to the BLS) with an unemployment rate of 4%. Clearly programmers are in the top 1% of workers worldwide, by a very comfortable margin, and are within the top 10% even among the rich countries. Nevertheless, they constantly insist on slashdot that they deserve much more than this and that they're the modern equivalent of slaves, that laws should be passed favoring them even more and that they should form unions etc.

I realize this will be modded down to "troll". Of course, there are a few modders here (not most of them, of course) who think that anything which challenges any idea they have in their heads is a troll. Ohwell...

I don't believe it

[maxwell demon]

You cannot virtually grow food. In the end, humans need something real to eat.

Re:I don't believe it

[neokushan]

That's bullcrap, my computer is chocked full of cookies and every time I visit a website, it grows more!

Software is the means, not the end

[Anonymous Coward]

There's certainly a revolution happening but it's not about software companies. That's confusing the food industry with the refrigeration industry. The winners of tomorrow are firms that can use software to create knowledge pools that can exploit new markets successfully. Future digital businesses may look more like 4chan than like IBM or Oracle.

and some places have little to no QA + poor IT

[Joe_Dragon]

and some places have little to no QA + poor IT support as well.

A lot of falls on management who does not know that much about IT.

Re:and some places have little to no QA + poor IT

[hedwards]

That's socialist talk buddy. Next thing you're going to suggest that executives shouldn't get obscene bonuses for running their company into the ground.

Answered your own question

[petes_PoV]

management simply does not have any appreciation or understanding of good coding practices

There are no measures - just like there is no objective measurement of good prose. As a consequence management places value on things that it CAN measure: cost, time, manpower, bugs, lines of code. What all this means is that without any way to measure what is "good" code, or to quantify its "goodness" all the coding practices are really just as much hot air as any other management fad.

Back to the reason why developers are considered 2nd class citizens (actually, fourth class: customers are second class citizens, prospective customers are first class and suppliers are third class). The reason is that they produce nothing with any measurable value. Sure the software they write SOMETIMES adds to a company's profits, but the link between a specific piece of code and a line in the P&L is tenuous at best and non-existent most of the time. If you want to improve your worth (to the company, to society, to yourself) come up with a way of demonstrating the hard-currency value of your code: how handling a particular exception is worth $500 and how reading that input data is worth $2000. When you can do that, there's be some value to employing developers - until then, they're just a cost item.

Re:Answered your own question

[Billly Gates]

Management hates I.T. because their bosses are accountants who view it as a cost center rather than an asset. The problem is the bean counters are all upper management in most fortune 1,000 companies today and frankly do not care about productivity as programmers waste money anyway.

Many are switching to clouds and switching from C#/C++ to Excel. If Excel was fine for these bean counters then it is fine for real programming too. Then they do not have to waste it on I.T. and these silly contracptions called databases.

Confirmation Bias

[Mozai]

THIS JUST IN
An expert of [field of study] believes [field of study] will change the world.
Also emphasizes that other people are not taking [field of study] seriously.

We still don't understand the scale of it

[petes_PoV]

We think we're pretty good at "doing" software. That because it's been around for 50 or more years, we've basically got it cracked and we know all the problems.

We don't

If we were to liken the software "revolution" to the change that the world saw when printing was invented/developed/popularised, we're not at the end of that process - we're still futzing around trying to design workable printing presses and wondering why our ink doesn't stick to the dried leaves we call paper.

Software isn't a process that we've mastered, we've barely started to use it. Hell, we don't even have a functional language to write our stuff in: one that deals with the abstractions and realities of the world we live in, as the spoken and written languages we use everyday allow us to communicate with each other..