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Software Developers Are Now More Valuable To Companies Than Money, Says Survey (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: As our global economy increasingly comes to run on technology-enabled rails and every company becomes a tech company, demand for high-quality software engineers is at an all-time high. A recent study from Stripe and Harris Poll found that 61 percent of C-suite executives believe access to developer talent is a threat to the success of their business. Perhaps more surprisingly -- as we mark a decade after the financial crisis -- this threat was even ranked above capital constraints. And yet, despite being many corporations' most precious resource, developer talents are all too often squandered. Collectively, companies today lose upward of $300 billion a year paying down "technical debt," as developers pour time into maintaining legacy systems or dealing with the ramifications of bad software. This is especially worrisome, given the outsized impact developers have on companies' chances of success. Software developers don't have a monopoly on good ideas, but their skill set makes them a uniquely deep source of innovation, productivity and new economic connections. When deployed correctly, developers can be economic multipliers -- coefficients that dramatically ratchet up the output of the teams and companies of which they're a part.
Naa, that would be un-capitalist. Developers must be cheap wage-slaves that do not have a real career-path and are unable to find a job once they hit 50. That will surely not have any impact on whether smart people go into software writing or not, right?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And open concept offices.
with ants
Step one of the cure for this is: STOP USING SHITTY MICROSOFT SOFTWARE! Re-train everyone with Microsoft "qualifications" to use REAL software. Then.. most tasks that currently take 15-20 people, will take 1-2. Tasks that take 500 with M$ software, will take 15-20.
If they considered developers more important than money, they'd pay the developers more to keep the skilled ones. Every time a developer leaves a company, a hunk of business knowledge walks out the door with him.
Companies care about that quarter's finance report, and the C-level execs care only about fleecing the company for all they can stuff into their own pockets. Look at what they do, not what some survey says.
software developers that donâ(TM)t bring in money directly or indirectly get the door hittting them in their ass on the way out
Maybe it just sounds too much like 40 years of businesses claiming there was a shortage of engineers in the U.S. when what they meant was there was a shortage of engineers that could be treated really badly.
Or maybe it's the fact that companies only seem to be willing to hire H1Bs that will do anything not to go back to their shitholes, or young kids who are stupid enough to believe managements promises and have no family or social life to distract from putting in 80+ hour weeks ?
Software Developers Who Are Willing To Work For Uncompetitive Wages And No Benefits Are Now More Valuable To Companies Than Money, Says Survey
that technical debt as insurance to keep my fucking job.
This just tells me that developers need to get organized and start saying no to 80+ work weeks collectively. Otherwise it will be divided they fall, forever.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I was one of the developers who was tasked with fixing the mess made by a foreign team of developers. It cost the prominent company that I was contracting to more in the end not less.
The sun rose today.
Microsoft has just announced paid extended support for Windows 7 as too many companies are using it. There’s a lot of server 2003 systems out there too, with companies rather risking security exploits than upgrade.
The tech companies are making hand over fist, yet salaries remain stagnant. The last offer I got was about 30% lower than what I'm currently making. I'm not saying all tech companies are like this but it's time (long overdue, actually) for salaries to jump 50% or more.
I just bought a house for the low, low price of only 2 software developers.
BREAKING! Not paying competitive wages is a short term gain that if left unchecked causes more problems than it solved.
Forget how long I've been out of work, it's been 2-3 years now since I quit looking.
Employees are our most valuable asset? I'm pretty sure it's actually still money.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
And since we have less of that nowadays, I'd say this survey is a decade too late.
It's like saying "gold is worth more than money!" - totally meaningless.
One (gold, developers) is a commodity that IS exchanged, the other (money) is the medium OF exchange.
Saying that "commodity X" is worth more than "exchange medium Y" makes no sense because a commodity CANNOT be worth "more" or "less" than the medium of exchange used - it can only ever be worth a specified amount of Y.
No where does it say that companies think developers are more important than money.
The results state that the companies perceive the risk of not being able to find skills as higher than the risks of not being able to access capital.
This is especially true if you're a cash rich organisation.
In the current financial climate finding returns on your investments is hard. Interest rates are at historically low levels, bond returns are zero, and so that leaves higher risk investments to get returns. That effectively translates into money moving into the stock market and VC type investments which pushes money further and further up the risk tree making funding generally easy to find.
What management school fails to teach young inexperienced executives: If the company's future existence depends on whether or not an employee does the job correctly or not, they are "worth more than money".
Incurring technical debt is a business decision.
And it may well be the right decision.
For example, in a startup, time to market typically trumps software quality.
And there are a lot of startups in the software field...
Not at my company, and certainly not at any other publicly-traded company.
Maybe at some privately-held company until it gets bought out.
Let them burn.
Right behind carbon paper.
The question is bogus: money is so cheap now -- with robust stock and bond markets and historically low interest rates -- that business people now are right to have no concerns about getting capital in all its forms.
So yes, developers are more important than something which is not important at all. Whoopee.
Here's the thing, developers: we're just a way to get something done.
(1) We are not strategic, unless we find a new way that others can't do.
(2) If we find something new and it's interesting, there will be an open-source solution soon enough.
(3) goto 1
If you want to be well-paid and important, go to business school or law school and make the kind of relationships that enable you to close critical deals.
If you want to be important, become a scientist working on climate change.
If you want to play with things that do what you tell them to do and don't argue, become a computer scientist. Just don't expect to be important or well-paid.
The problem isn't the lack of access to developers - it's hiring bad developers! Based on the stats they are quoting. Try spend more time hiring better developers not just warm bodies!
"Developers spend over 17 hours every week dealing with maintenance issues like debugging and refactoring, and about a quarter of that time is spent fixing bad code."
13.5 hours
Technical debt
3.8 hours
Bad code
a cubicle.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Businesses all across the nation are complaining to the administration that they are unable to find any employees, which is leading to the executive branch saying that we are at "full employment" (this administration, like all others, is easily baited into bragging about any "good news" that is offered to them from the outside).
Now we see companies saying that software developers are more valuable than money.
This is all a coordinated ploy to demand the federal government not clamp down on outsourcing and imported tech workers - AND IT'S ALL PROVABLY A LIE. The most basic law of economics is "supply and demand", which tells us that when ANY thing is in short supply/high demand then its price will rise. If there is such a shortage of tech workers, and if they are worth more than money, then the price (in this case: wages and benefits) would be rising dramatically and the problem would eventually fix itself as people abandon other fields and re-train for the high paying jobs. Since this is not happening, we know there is no such shortage of domestic tech workers, and they're certainly NOT "worth more than money" to these corporate bosses.
It's all an attempt to keep Trump from clamping down on the various escape hatches these businesses have been using to avoid the costs of employees within the American marketplace.
As a manager, you crow about reduced costs and then leave before the shit hits the fan.
Who looks at total lifecycle cost anyway? What matters is yearly expenditure.
When IT is done right, managers can't be grifters, because the enterprise runs well and when you grift, engage in drama, or otherwise begin messing with things, it totally screws up every fascet of the organization and becomes noticable from everyone down to the Janitors.
"Software Developers Are Now More Valuable To Companies Than Money, Says Survey" Isn't that why they get paid? If the money was more valuable than the developer, wouldn't they fire the developer and keep the money? Wouldn't the same go for any employee? Companies find more value in employees than money, thus they give up money to keep employees.
I've consistently found that companies do NOT value domain knowledge in developers very much. Many colleagues have agreed with me on this. I'm not sure exactly why, other than perhaps co's would rather have somebody skilled in the latest eye-candy UI's more than an expert on their domain; and somebody who has been in the company for a while may have let their UI "fad" skills slip compared to a hungry grad. It's called "ageism" in other contexts.
Books are judged by covers: UI fad compliance. Human nature. I've seen PHB's go gaga over "fashionable" and animated UI's, even giving a bastard dev a raise, and completely ignoring the horrid functionality and operational problems that came with it.
(I can rant all day about the state of UI technology/standards AND human reaction to it. UI issues wag the IT dog.)
Table-ized A.I.
Post-scarcity society. Post-scarcity economy. The worth of money degenerates and disappears - ECB negative interest is almost a standard now and Jeff Bezos wears the same jeans I do and has the same phone. The worth of knowledge however suddenly rises because in a functioning post scarcity society is the only thing left that counts. Hence people are starting to notice the nerd camp who value knowledge above popularity actually on to something.
Seems very fitting to me. I'm just wasn't expecting that to happen that fast and I'm my lifetime. But then again, nobody did, so that's a pleasant surprise.
All in all, the consequence is logical. Capitalism has run its course, knowledge and culture are King. We need more of this, and fast, so people stop fighting stupid wars and accruing useless tat.
My 2 cents. Errrm, "knowledge points". :-)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Regrettably there is a disconnect between upper management making all the 'right' noises, and them having a clue about what they are talking about. I work for a large, global corporation (not naming names, but they are all more or less the same), where the top managers apparently genuinely want to do all the right things for their engineers. Unfortunately, they also think that leadership is all about being 'inspirational', 'alpha-males', 'knowing the jargon' etc etc. So, we see constant campaigns about who is this year's 'so-and-so hero' and similar things - in fact, anything except asking us engineers what we would like. Maybe they have guessed (correctly) that it would involve things like more money and better offices.
I think one of the things that seem obvious to any engineer, is that you have to invest in developing your assets; it's kind of basic. And to my mind, the people who actually have the skills to produce whatever the company is selling, must be amongst those assets; this is true for what you might call 'physical engineering' or manufacturing, and it is much more true in SW engineering, since the skills required can often be so much more intricate. Absurdly, companies are willing to pay sales-people much more than engineers; I'm not sure why - perhaps it is because upper management mostly come from a sales background.
I've seen these lies time and time again.
It's deliberately false and misleading. The intent is to encourage greater labour supply by pretence of outstripped demand.
In reality, they mean "we only want to accept the top 1 in 100 developers, oh but without them even requesting twice the price".
"We'd like a developer with 10 years experience in this 5 year old technology"
"Requirements: senior full stack developer with 5+ years experience in all of: node, react, python, angular, android, c++, go, scala, rust, assembly, Fpga, Mongolian, Klingon, and that click language from south Africa. 50k/year ex. tax."
Nothing to see here. Just the usual unreasonable selfishness.
What does the headline even mean? A business quantifies things by ROI... developers should be no different than any other asset. Maybe they just need to work out what the 'R' means.
Based upon first principles, how can anything be more valuable than money? Isn't money the ultimate fungible asset?
During the middle of a drought, OK water is more valuable. In the middle of a famine certainly food is more crucial. But aside from times of crisis, it seems to me that money is always the preferred asset class, as it can be converted into anything else.
I'm going to actively ignore weak currencies for the sake of my argument!
You fire us and replace us with H-1B drones or outsource to 'dev centers' in third world countries.
As we age, you push us off onto the shit projects which keeps us from getting experience in new technologies, thus making us unhireable after you lay us off.
You refuse to train us but expect but demand that anyone you hire has years of experience in your particular tech mix.
etc., etc., etc.
Maybe the problem isn't that there's a lack of available tech talent, maybe the problem is that there is a lack of management talent. Used to be that 'managers' actually used to put thought and effort into building a workforce, recognizing it as something of strategic importance to the long-term health of their business. Now, 'managers' just expect things to happen for them.
money can be borrowed - mgt thinks so can s/w talent...
nothing to see here - move along
Bullshit.