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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.
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
About half the politically-minded people I run across in IT are hardcore Ron Paul types, and the other half are Karl Marx types. Both of those groups are annoying in different ways, and tend to ruin any conversation that they barge into.
However, I do have to say... at least the Ron Paul types are often competent and good at their jobs. I have NEVER , during 15 years in the field, EVER encountered a competent IT professional who dreamed of being in a union. Union culture is pretty much the antithesis of what makes a good engineer tick. I clicked on and briefly skimmed your profile, and could not help but notice that not a single one of your comments over recent months has anything to do with technology or IT work.
"...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.
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 have NEVER , during 15 years in the field, EVER encountered a competent IT professional who dreamed of being in a union.
Now I can't prove my competence in a slashdot post, but I am a software engineer that fully supports unionization.
I am fairly compensated, as I do a good job of negotiating what I believe I am worth. But there is more to unionization than compensation. Though I do support collective bargaining (which does not need to be seniority based, and can be performance based).
Unionization can be used as a tool to bring product quality back into the hands of those that produce the product. Having a union to collectively support only quality changes should improve overall product quality.
Unionization is a tool that can be utilized. I would much rather have more tools at my disposal than less (though we need not use every tool for every task).
Just remember that the corporation is bargaining against you, as there goal is to maximize profit, and they are doing it collectively. If you want to even the score you do your bargaining collectively. But corporations have also done a great job to convince the American people that Unions are bad and lazy, so I doubt I'll be changing any minds here.
Lastly, Unionization is fully in-line with Libertarian ideology, even the Neo Libertarians of the US Libertarian party, and the likes of Ron Paul. Collective bargaining is an important tool that allows capitalism to be successful.
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".
No mod points today, so I'll post to keep your reasonable, polite and on-topic post from being buried by the "mod down anything supportive of unions" brigade. To the person modding the OP flamebait: If it's an echo chamber you want, there are plenty of other sites that will meet your needs.
Lastly, Unionization is fully in-line with Libertarian ideology
Voluntary unionization, yes. But voluntary unions don't last; if the union is at all successful it begins to focus on perpetuating itself and its lock on the labor side of the bargaining table. In some cases scabs get beaten, maimed or killed. In other cases, the unions champion changes in the law that make non-union labor effectively illegal. Even when those extremes are avoided, intense peer pressure is applied to those who don't want to join the union.
The biggest problem with unions and collective bargaining, though, is hidden in your parenthetical comment "which does not need to be seniority based, and can be performance based". No, it can't be performance based, because that requires an objective way to measure performance. The normal employer/employee relationship has a lot of fuzziness that allows hard-to-quantify performance factors to be taken into account. But unions need to establish clear rules and structures that can be written into the collective bargaining agreement, at least if the agreement is going to do anything more than specify minimums. That's why so many collective agreements end up being purely seniority-based: because it's about the only thing that can be objectively measured.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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!
I am fairly compensated, as I do a good job of negotiating what I believe I am worth. But there is more to unionization than compensation. Though I do support collective bargaining (which does not need to be seniority based, and can be performance based).
The collective bargaining aspect alone would be a huge boon to Software Engineering and IT salaries. It's appalling how IT workers (who tend to be introverted and lack negotiation skills) are routinely fucked in terms of compensation.
It's both sad and funny--the engineers who believe they are being fairly compensated and who are confident that they're paid "above average" tend to be the ones getting royally screwed.