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

So why not treat them well?

[gweihir]

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?

Re:So why not treat them well?

[ShanghaiBill]

But even so, I hear these horror stories about how software developers are treated and I just have not seen it.

Me neither. I have worked for companies that had catered meals, free soda, laundry service, sky diving bonding trips, etc. I have had plenty of opportunities to travel. I have worked some late nights, and done a few death marches, but those only lasted a few weeks, out of a career lasting decades.

Software developers are likely the most spoiled employees in the history of the world.

People will alway whine.

Re:So why not treat them well?

[spagthorpe]

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.

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...

Re:So why not treat them well?

[PhrostyMcByte]

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"?

And yet there's agile

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

And open concept offices.

Re:And yet there's agile

[Seven Spirals]

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."

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.

Yeah, right

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yeah, right

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Yeah haven't heard that one before

[Crashmarik]

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 ?

FTFY

[thevirtualcat]

Software Developers Who Are Willing To Work For Uncompetitive Wages And No Benefits Are Now More Valuable To Companies Than Money, Says Survey

.ORG

[fluffernutter]

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.

Yet us 50+ folks are unemployed

[Snotnose]

Forget how long I've been out of work, it's been 2-3 years now since I quit looking.

Re:Yet us 50+ folks are unemployed

[Locke2005]

I'm 57 and got at least 3 calls TODAY offering to submit me for contract software positions. Granted, a lot of recruiters try to low-ball me on the hourly rate, but they change their tune as soon as you call their bluff and tell them you're not interested at that low rate.

Talk about not understanding an article / Poll

[Harlequin80]

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.

Domain knowledge NOT valued, fads are

[Tablizer]

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.

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.)