Are Software Developers Really More Valuable To Companies Than Money? (cnbc.com)

Recently the CFO of Stripe revealed a surprising statistic: 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... 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.
His article even ends with tips for managers about how to get the most out of their developers.

• Consider very carefully the current and potential allocation of developer time.
• Embrace the cloud, saving in-house developers to work on higher-impact projects.
• Hire leaders who have technical backgrounds, so they can make better hiring and strategic decisions, and offer better management of developers.

But first managers have to decide if they agree with his initial premise.

Are software developers more valuable to companies than money?

Comments

Re:If used corectly.

[Billly Gates]

At the end of the day the bad managers always keep their jobs during a downsizing. There jobs are off the table.

A successful gas company which I will not name here has 75% of all employees managers at their corporate office. Many have just 1 to 2 people in their so called "teams".

Everyone else got laid off and this company is still struggling to remain competitive when half the workforce sits in meetings and gets paid $150K a year to tell their 1 employee what to do!

Yes they wanted me as an outsourced contractor as I was dispensable. But not the managers where 2/3s of the staff left just sit in meetings of course.