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.

Comments

Re:And yet there's agile

[Klaxton]

I've worked in the industry for many years, usually with a private office or shared with one person. Recently got a job in an agile "scrum" shop, which went to an open floorplan a few months later. Miserable experience on both counts. Every day you get a Jira work ticket for some "the user wants to see" granule of a thing that you had no part in designing. Zero privacy. It is amazingly de-motivating.

Re:So why not treat them well?

[_Sharp'r_]

Having a measured IQ >150, I can tell you with my excellent two-minute Googling skills there are approximately 300K in the U.S. if you're using the Stanford-Binet scale. For the Wechsler scale, it's more like 140K, which is still a lot of people. Heck, the Prometheus Society's cut-off for membership is 160+. I guess to you, they basically don't exist...