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The Rise of Developeronomics
New submitter Geist3 writes "Forbes has an article by Venkatesh Rao asserting that the safest investment for both corporations and individuals is in software developers. Throwing money at talented coders now — even on random projects — will build relationships that are likely to pay off big in the future. 'In what follows, I am deliberately going to talk about the developers like they are products in a meat market. For practical purposes, they are, since the vast majority of them haven't found a way to use their own scarcity to their advantage.'"
A bubble in Developers! Developers! Developers! .COM boom all over again... Then it will crash and half of the idiots will stay and they will lay off half of the skilled workers.
That means we will get a bunch of snot noes guys jumping into Computer Science who are in it just for the money. It will create the
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Are you saying that if you invest in highly skilled staff there are benefits?
This person is clearly a quack and has no fundamental understanding of IT stereotyping. The longer you've been somewhere the more useless you are (sheesh, we all know this right guys? Guys?)
Step 1. Pay Developers - Step 2. ??? - Step 3. Profit!!!
"...the vast majority of them haven't found a way to use their own scarcity to their advantage."
The way: Unions.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Well, then Forbes and Venkatesh Rao are idiots.
The safest investment for corporations and individuals is corporations, as usual. They control everything and they're not going away.
Nobody wants talented coders. People want cheap, get-it-out-the-door coders. And those are in India.
People will buy any old fucking thing you slap a lower case i in front of. Why bother trying? Why bother risking a talented coder coming along and doing stuff on their own? Why, they could get the sense that have some sort of control over, or input into, the project. If they leave before we ship, no one will know how to fix everything. It's best to keep monkeys doing the monkey work, and to pay a "project manager" to vaguely tell them what to do.
A "talented" coder is like a UFO. Everyone talks about them. Some of them say the place in the other business park has one. But no one's really sure what one looks like, or how to tell if one's real when it comes time to interview people for a position.
Furthermore, coders, especially the "talented" ones, don't exactly fly the banner of allegiance. They'll leave at the first opportunity to make more money. If you don't let them take control of a project, they'll either do it their own way, or go somewhere else that lets them do it their own way. Have you heard of open source software? Nothing ever gets done because they keep "forking" things when they have their own ideas!
If you give money and attention to talented coders, they'll think they're worth something, and then you'll have to compete for their work!
No, thank you. I'd much rather we all agree to keep treating them like shit, paying them shit, and not really understanding what they do.
This is exactly how Rockefeller was thinking: when you come across talent, you hire, then you adapt your business based on the people available. Even if in the short term it does not fit in an existing MS-Project plan, over the years you build a strong core and the team is driving the business, not the other way around. And if people walk away to get more experience, you keep the door open so you can benefit from what they did elsewhere.
Unfortunately, a lot of companies are doing the exact opposite because the MBAs are trained to manage by balance sheet, stock price and quarterly projections: short-term metrics.
lucm, indeed.
investment is actually investment in people who will live out long careers in the sector
long careers? He means ageism might kick in at 35 instead of 30? Sign me up!
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Speaking for myself mostly, I spend most my free time playing games rather than developing a product or service. Yes I do invest in learning new skills and technologies. But once I get a grasp of it, I go back to my game.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
I am one sexy piece of meat. Oh, yes, I am :-P
The industry standard when I was in school, was that the average programmer could churn out 10 debugged lines of code a day. I know I could run at 300 lines of C a day if distractions were minimized and the coke machine didn't run out. I had friends that could do 600 without too much trouble. (none of us got good grades, because we were writing too much code.)
These days the company I work for keeps the phones ringing, cube noise up, and enough meetings that I'm lucky to write a few lines. Some days go by without any objective measure of success.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I can see the Fly By Night Degree Programs swooping down on this and getting more stooges to sign up as software programmers.
You too can make thousands of dollars more per year .
It is misinformation like this that drives me crazy about this business.
Is in the developer's profession ...
I know developers which are worth 1000 and more of the cheap minds calling itself developers ... Sad but true.
> the vast majority of them haven't found a way to use their own scarcity to their advantage Strewth, if I'd know I was that scarce and valuable I would have warned the guys that just 'insourced' our projects. BTW, 'insourcing' means bringing a project it into the company then sending it out to India. It sounds more cozy than 'I am sacking all indigenous programmers and employing truckloads elsewhere because I bought half the software house'. Good luck with that. I am going fishing.
Has anyone actually read this article? The guy is talking out his ass. As far as I can tell he's got nothing behind anything he's saying. In the places I've worked, developers have certainly been valuable-- this is why, after all, we're paid a lot of money to do stuff a lot of us would do anyway-- but the critical assests of the companies have been things like the reputation of a domain name, or the side-agreements with various content providers, and so on. As for a new bubble, yes, as far as I can tell there's a venture capital bubble of sorts in the SF area: VCs are tossing money at 20-somethings that'll work 80 hour weeks under the delusion that they're going to be the next facebook. This makes a degree of sense from the investor point of view, if you consider that there's nothing else going on in the economy remotely worth investing in. This time around, there's this weird phenomena where there are no rental apartments available at any price in SF, but there's plenty of vacant office space: the kids are working on laptops in their living rooms and out in cafes, not in actual offices-- they're also completely trashing their backs and hands in the process. If you really want to invest in a growth industry, think about "physical therapy".
Status reports! MORE status reports! Scrum stand up, daily reports, weekly reports, time sheet, burndown chart. It is easy to! Today: 8 hours - Updating status reports. Rince and repeat.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You mean Ballmer was right when he got stuck in a loop, repeating "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers..."???
Seems to me that there is miles of difference between a born Engineer (a smart, logical thinker who loves tinkering and solving problems), and a sold Engineer (someone who has no inclination or desire towards engineering, but simply wants to make as much money as possible).
So very true. As someone who did a fair amount of freelance developing over the last decade, the number of people who are using compilers because they think it will get them rich is truly scary. Non-comp sci types are *probably* safe to let loose on basic web development tasks, and that is about it. If the number of developers that I have meet that are the really talented types who really 'get' coding are representative of the industry as a whole, I fear for our future.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The right answer to your thought experiment problem is to find/make an accountant who knows enough about software to write useful specifications, then put them to work on testing the results too. That's cheaper than trying to turn a good developer into a entry-level accountant, which isn't very likely to go well anyway.
I'm not quite sure I see where that argument is going, because the account who can spec and test is still not going to be able to actually build the software - but to build the software well you really should have a developer who can learn enough to understand why and how a system will be used.
So basically you are better off (as in: it's no more expensive) to find a good developer with an interest in or willingness to learn Accounting. Though the spec accountant can still be of use...
Also, I don't think accounting and programming are as disparate fields as you might think...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Mr. Rao: Please write articles while drunk more often. They are quite amusing.
Hardly any of them are in it just for the money. The ones that are just drop out during uni when they realise that you need a brain. I've only met one or two coders who really salivate over the money. Most just want an interesting job to work on and good people to work with.
Maybe Australia is different, but 99% of the coders that I've worked with would never drop the ball in order to just make more money (I can only think of one guy and he was a genuine psychopath). All of the good ones stick around and get the damn thing delivered, normally even when that means late nights and horrible bosses. We have professional pride and always strive to deliver the best possible system given the constraints. If you don't, then word gets around pretty quickly and you'll find it very difficult to get more work. You can always spot these people, they have lots of 3-6 month projects on their resume, and when you drill them for details it's always a bit too vague.
the knowledge economy do not work, as the ease of knowledge distribution works against it. End result is a continual stack of draconian laws to try and counteract that, eroding all respect for law in he process.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Srsly very good article. I'm always thinking about moving to USA becuase of these guys. Srsly the rest of the world lives in the stone age. Literaly. (Why the fuck I fuck around in EU, fuck knows....)
We're talking about developers here. People that think you can always throw more RAM or disc space at a problem rather than keep their code neat and clean.
Those are the managers, not the developers. But the mobile market has helped convince managers that throwing more hardware at a problem isn't always better than throwing more developer time at it. If you want your application to run on a device that the end user already has, it'll have to fit the RAM, storage, and network limits of the device. PDAs, tablets, and smartphones tend to have less of each than laptops, desktops, and servers.
You can practice your fake smiles. It is called acting.
Then why don't technical colleges have acting as a strongly recommended course?
People *are* things. A social system can be manipulated to give the most-positive outcome the same way a computer system can.
That still doesn't help people like me who have a disability that impairs their understanding of social systems. How are people born with mild autism supposed to eat in an economy that strongly rewards a people person?
As a coder my strategy has been to get rid of any money that might come my way as quickly as possible. The value of things in my life is much higher than the value of a bank account balance or poorly performing stock in my portfolio. Smart people tell me things will be better next year and we may indeed see a new boom. I mean, like at the hype around Groupon. Pffft, if that doesn't prove that a new tech bubble is likely, nothing does.
I have read the article and all the sub articles and one universal truth keeps popping up. That talent is hard to find. While one writer seemed to grasp that not everyone wants to move to Silicon Valley, the problem for rare talent is that realizing that there is a lot of talent around the rest of the country...from people that didn't graduate from MIT, Stanford or UC Berkley...and guess what... just like normal every day americans they have family and friends and while they may be slumped over some desk doing mediocre mundane software development, the family and friends thing is more important than doing something that would love to do but have other considerations to make..personal considerations.
At some point I have brought up this point before in a previous story but it would be oh so nice if places like google would locate shops in different parts of the country. I am not talking about huge datacenters that only employ 50 people or call centers to try to solve peoples problems. I am talking about software hubs. They dont have to be as glamorous as the mothership office and they dont have to support 3000 jobs...but there is lots of talent, particular in the southeast where i am , where people are hungering for work that they love to do in their own time. The bonus is, is that because most of the country costs about 300% less than san fran to live in places like Tennessee, Mississippi and Florida for example, the salaries don't have to be as big and you still get the same type of work - if you find the good talent , and there is some.
just thoughts and ramblings.
The real problem, one that the Fortune article almost correctly alluded to, is that in the Software Industry, wage stickiness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_(economics)) is extremely high. Corporations are willing to cost themselves tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of intangible damage in order to save a few thousand dollars on floor space because they either believe the slowdown in the general economy is also reflected in the Developer market, or because they don't understand the vast incremental value a talented developer brings.
Wage stickiness occurs because of imperfect information and from fairness concerns; it just doesn't seem fair to pay a senior developer doing 20 times more work what he's worth because then a company would have to figure out he's doing 20x more work and pay him a seven-figure salary. With imperfect information managers look to balance sheets, and because they can't effectively control their work force (because they don't understand them), they don't realize that one key person's departure caused the entire project to collapse or be delayed months, costing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
The one thing I got from the Fortune article is that people are starting in the business community to wrap their heads (imperfectly, of course) around the problem. One thing I think we'll see in the next 10 years as software eats the world is a loosening of wage stickiness. And you will start seeing the top 1% of programmers making salaries that start to compare to the CEO in the corner office when enough information percolates to management that those top 1% programmers are bringing more value to the company than the CEO.