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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.
I've quit one job and refused two others because of open offices. The two I refused were absolutely flabbergasted by my refusal. They literally could not understand why anyone wouldn't want to be in an open office space surrounded on 3.8 sides by glass-walled manager offices, loud ugly marketing girls, and a bunch of H1B dudes who couldn't be bothered to wear deodorant. That place (MX Logic) had the worst looking office I've ever seen. One of them offered me the job on the spot after the interview and I was already shutting them down and refusing it before they even got started. I told them there is about a zero percent chance of getting anyone really talented to take the gig, because they had this ridiculous noisy slave pit thing going. I nearly left before I even *did* the interview I was so disgusted with the place. The hiring manager was (of course) offended, but he was also clueless. About a year after that interview I had a guy come up to me at the local Maker Space who was one of the "technical resources" for the company during the interview (quiet guy in the back of the room). He told me "My god was I cheering when you refused them over the goddamn open workspace idiocy. My boss was upset over that for weeks. They still talk about it during the hiring process and argue about it."
Forget how long I've been out of work, it's been 2-3 years now since I quit looking.
LOL. You've massively understated the ageism and the issue of job qualifications.
First, the ageism problem is associated also with a problem that people aren't allowed to take breaks. After having great success even to the point of being a chief architect on an 80-man program, I quit working for a while and now can't find anyone who will let me start at the bottom.
But, the job qualification thing is really ridiculous. A good software engineer is a specialist at picking up new domains, languages, frameworks, etc. That really is the job. While working in a major corporation, I would switch projects routinely with no problem. It rarely took more than a couple of weeks to come up to speed on the new group's tools and languages which were always different. To require knowledge specific to the project before entering the project is stupid.
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.
It won't really have any impact, because young people don't think they'll ever get old. Or it will be different for them.
Had a 20-something at my last job make a number of comments about some of the older developers there, saying they'd hate to still be working at that age, and that they are probably stuck doing the same work because they can't learn anything new. I don't know why he was telling me this, as I was twice his age at the time, but it's obvious that he doesn't think he'll be in the same position.
They ultimately did lay off a lot of their senior engineers and replace a lot of the position with 20-somethings, including in project management positions. A number of those projects never saw the light of day after years of re-writes into new frameworks.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
I'd actually love to see a study into this -- how do you walk the fine line of broadening your toolset versus reeling in over-excitable young devs, without seeming like "that old guy who doesn't like to learn new things"?
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.