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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.
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.
"...the vast majority of them haven't found a way to use their own scarcity to their advantage."
The way: Unions.
No, that's how the non-scarce resources create an advantage for their collective selves. If you're not scarce you make yourself scarce by joining a group that then says "well, we're it" so you must treat us as if we are scarce. Sort of a "you don't like what I want... well guess what... you have to give it to me anyway because all my buddies are going to hold out for the same and no one will do you work if you don't meet my demands".
Scarce resources have power individually, through simply being scarce. Sometimes it takes a while for someone to realize just how scarce they actually are. Scarce resources are special. They might be really close to the only one who can do the job required job in the required amount of time to the desired degree. That's what makes them scarce. They have the right experience, with the right knowledge, and the possibly even right background for the exact work that needs to be done. Truly scarce resources are capable of getting more than they would be unionized because they are not lumped in with the not quite so scarce.
My present is the activity I am currently engaged in with the purpose of turning the future into a better past.
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".