Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
What's more important than the obvious lack of productivity that gives the company as a whole is the way it demotivates the employees.
I was in a similar situation. I lost my private office to a shared office, then to an "open concept" plan. I went from 500+ lines/day C# to nearly none (unless I worked from home). It was the meetings, general drone of noise, lack of a door to keep sales and service personnel out.. etc. Interruption after interruption. It wore on me.
We implemented some functions to try to prevent the interruptions (e.g. single point of contact within the software team, acting as the gatekeeper/barking dog), but it really wasn't enough. Software team productivity dropped from high 80s of % time spent developing to under 60. I was under 40% of my time spent developing due to my long term experience with the products. That combined with a non-competitive wage for our local market and I was extremely unhappy. I desperately wanted to be productive and wage wasn't a huge issue when I was a happy employee but it became quite important when I could make more at any other shitty job in town.
Long story short I left to do independent contracting at a much higher rate. I much happier getting stuff done and getting paid what I know is a fair wage. The company I left is now looking for a replacement that will expect the wage I expected and will need 3-6 months experience with their products to be a contributing member of the team. It's costing them. Of course IF they find someone who is actually good (finding good devs is extremely difficult, I helped hire the last 2 member sof their team and 90% of the applicants were duds) they will still have problems keeping them productive and keeping them at all.
A few local companies have it figured out and are getting most of the local talent (which often means poaching as talented people tend to have jobs). If the smaller private companies don't step up to maintain their current staff they are going to find themselves without talent and having to cough up a lot of money to attract talent to a high cost of living location and then train those people.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
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".
>I know I could run at 300 lines of C a day Someone call security. We have a mid-level manager masquerading as a coder. I've never met a competent coder who considers lines-of-code/day to be an even remotely useful metric of productivity. Coders who eat through requirements like a shark through chum with tight, transparent patterns...those are the good ones.
On the last moderate sized project I worked on where I had full control of development IIRC I ended up with about 70,000 lines of code, i.e., all comments etc stripped out. There would have been more code but (sigh...) about half way through the process the client changed course and about 30% of the code had to be ripped out as they no longer wanted that functionality - that code isn't included in the figure of 70,000 lines of code.
Total time for the entire development process was about 1,800 hours - which included the above activities and, of course, understanding the pre-existing system, meetings, designing the solution, removing the code for the discarded functionality, more meetings, full documentation - source comments, system documents and substantial (>100 pages) user manuals, email with stakeholders, more meetings.
It is in use by governments, businesses and universities and it took over two years before anyone found (what they thought was) a bug.
However most people/businesses don't want to pay what it costs for that kind of result.
To be fair I think figures like 10 lines/day usually mean that at the end of the entire process 10 lines that survived and are documented and survive testing account for a day of time. But still you really have to wonder about the people at the low end who managed to get the average down to 10 lines a day... were they producing code that was simply discarded wholesale? Were they producing negative lines of code, i.e., somehow intentionally or unintentionally sabotaging the efforts of others?
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop