Software Developers Are Now More Valuable To Companies Than Money, Says Survey (cnbc.com) 168
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.
So why not treat them well? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't understand this. I am 44, have been doing software development since college. I am already a millionaire (if you include my 401k savings), and am on track to be a multi-millionaire when I retire. I have never worked an 80 hour week, and only had a few 60 hours and one 70 hour week in my entire career.
It helps that I never married or had kids, and invested wisely. But even so, I hear these horror stories about how software developers are treated and I just have not seen it.
The city I live in is a
Re:So why not treat them well? (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
People will alway whine.
And there you are wrong. I have a pretty good career myself. But I see how many coders are treated and I am not surprised at all that there are by far not enough good ones.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
The issue is very much that a lot of the few people that could be good at it, see the working conditions and career options and go somewhere else. Also, 150+IQ people basically do not exist. I gather this is some wired non-standard US scale...
Re:So why not treat them well? (Score:4, Informative)
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: (Score:1)
Did I miss something? Why does software developing require 150+ IQ?
Most development work can be done by competent craftspeople that are well trained, and somewhat smarter than average.
Having gone to a major technical institution, that contained many very high IQ individuals, I can attest that the most effective programmers are not always the smartest.
Re: (Score:2)
Programming doesn't require 150+ IQ. Maybe 115 for an average programmer. An average CS student is in the 120-125 range. I suggest addressing your question as a reply to the comment which said it requires 150+ IQ [slashdot.org] to find out why he thinks that.
Re: (Score:2)
As I said, "wired non-standard US scale". It is basically designed to sell IQ tests and you fell fro the scam. The standard scale goes from 50 to 150 and loses accuracy drastically at something like 135.
Re: (Score:2)
From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Re: (Score:2)
... see the working conditions and career options and go somewhere else.
Where do they go?
Doctors, lawyers and investment bankers work longer hours than programmers. Nearly everyone else makes less money.
Maybe they become underwater welders?
Re: (Score:2)
real estate
3 out of 4 real estate agents quit or go inactive within two years of starting. Reason: they are making way less money than they expected.
I have a real estate license. I do an occasional transaction for friends and family, but am otherwise inactive.
All have better hours and WAY better pay.
Absolute hogwash.
Re: (Score:3)
There is more than one IQ scale...you can wiki it. Oh, and they do exist.
Re: (Score:1)
Also, 150+IQ people basically do not exist. I gather this is some wired non-standard US scale...
All the smart people moving to and living in the US doesn't make it a non-standard scale.
Re: So why not treat them well? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
How many 3+ standard deviation people are we supposed to believe you know?
Same crit as you gave the GP. I doubt you know even one.
Re: (Score:1)
This is slashdot, kind of like Lake Woebegone. All are above average here.
Re: (Score:2)
So now YOUR a 3+ standard deviation person? Bullshit on you!
Re: (Score:1)
s/sailor/coder/
Re: (Score:1)
I completely agree with your retort to the 150+ IQ comment. Not all high IQ individuals even make good employees, or programmers. My family has several very high IQ individuals, and mostly it was wasted for one reason or another.
Good programming takes above average intelligence, desire, good training, hard work, and a keen understanding of Murphy's law. Higher intelligence can help if the other ingredients are there, but I have seen some really shitty programmers with high IQ's.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
People will alway whine.
And there you are wrong. I have a pretty good career myself. But I see how many coders are treated and I am not surprised at all that there are by far not enough good ones.
I think it depends on the company. I've worked for an established startup that still expected 70+ hours per week of it's coders. The company had all the things you expect for the startup. Free snacks. Break room with gaming consoles, ect. They were most happy with unmarried coders right out of college. If you were married you had better not have kids. If you are married and have kids your wife had better not work. Basically, anything that would take away their coding time is not a good employee. They
Re: (Score:1)
The *only* reason companies are presently treating developers well is because there are not nearly enough good ones to fill the need.
Look, by contrast, at how badly developers are treated specifically at video-game making companies. Everything that people complain about is true there. Ridiculous hours, low pay, shitty office space, etc. The companies get away with that because most young developers want to do that, so the supply is high enough for them to get away with it.
And that is exactly what happens
Re: (Score:2)
I have worked for companies that had catered meals, free soda, laundry service, sky diving bonding trips, etc
Me too, during the internet bubble, but not in the last ~15 years...have you? I get free coffee and oxygen though.
Re: So why not treat them well? (Score:2)
Free Oxygen? Do you work on Mars??
Re: So why not treat them well? (Score:1)
Dude, I will hit 60 next week, and have never had trouble finding an IT job. The market will dictate that valuable people get paid. I know a lot of guys that retire to part time programming, and make more than they did under salary. Just a matter of the will to keep your skills sharp.
Re:So why not treat them well? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Interesting)
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"?
Re: (Score:2)
This seems to vary a lot by country. The UK has low wages too, but Ireland pays a decent amount. Lots of EU immigrant workers in Ireland too.
Re: (Score:2)
And actually, that leads to a way to get even cheaper software developers: Hire ones over 50 to do the legacy technical debt stuff.
And yet there's agile (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And yet there's agile (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
....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.....
It begs the question, why even apply there in the first place.
Re: (Score:3)
It begs the question, why even apply there in the first place.
So you could see their office environment tucked away behind the job description on the internet?
Re: (Score:1)
No, it "raises" the question. Begging the question [wikipedia.org] is a logical fallacy in which the conclusion is assumed as a premise.
I know, I know, so many people have used it wrong that the wrong definition is now right. That, however, will not prevent me from pointing out that someone is wrong on the Internet.
Re: (Score:1)
The enormity of that usage makes me nauseous.
Re: (Score:2)
For anyone not up to date on xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2039/ [xkcd.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
A cubicle farm with a decent pair of noise canceling headphones is head and shoulders over an open floorplan bullpen that everybody walking by can read your monitor.
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like a real horror show. Safe to say you made the right move.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And yet there's agile (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft owns javascript? You have things backwards.
Re: (Score:3)
I was thinking the same thing. Although JavaScript, Java, and the surrounding ecosystems could have come from MS, no doubt.
Yeah, right (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Domain knowledge NOT valued, fads are (Score:3, Interesting)
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 t
Re: (Score:1)
Microsoft has now automated that with PowerBI. Most of those eye candy devs are going to be replaced by their customers soon.
Re: (Score:1)
PowerBI seems more geared toward charts and graphs, and less on the input and CRUD side.
Re: (Score:1)
It is- for now. Dang tool is evolving rather rapidly though, and it's easy enough to create input and crud for it in the C# sdk. Thing is though, it's extremely cloud based. If you are a large enough corporation, you MIGHT be able to get an onsite server, but even if you do, it will constantly be several months out of date. ONLY if you're willing to buy a bunch of seats for your executives to use the desktop app (which does have CRUD and data entry built in) or rent an Azure server, is it really an opti
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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,
Re: (Score:2)
You can see this demonstrated pretty w
Re: (Score:3)
So in a discussion of an article that says that software engineering tallent is more valuable than money, your argument is that these people are too expensive?
Seems to me that this wouldn't be possible if it weren't sufficiently pervasive, keeping wages down for older engineers, otherwise those IBM engineers would just go elsewhere rather than take shittier pay from IBM.
Re: (Score:2)
As for the point I'm trying to make; Older engineers too expensive compared to younger engineers and I'm pretty sure we all know that there hasn't actually been a lack of actual engineers (i.e not H1B workers), particularly software ones, ever since the dot.com bubble burst.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't know where you live, but in most places I think developers are paid fairly well. We offer straight-out-of-school newbies $80-$90k, and still some turn us down for better offers.
Most places are not the Bay Area or a few big US cities. In most of the world, new starter salaries in software development are rarely more than 1/3 of that level, and in many places they are much lower.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah haven't heard that one before (Score:4, Insightful)
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 ?
Re: (Score:2)
you misread, and i quote
"developer talent is a threat to the success of their business" thus the hiring of no talent, spot filling h1b. and if they accidentally get a talented h1b... replace and repeat.
FTFY (Score:5, Funny)
Software Developers Who Are Willing To Work For Uncompetitive Wages And No Benefits Are Now More Valuable To Companies Than Money, Says Survey
Re: (Score:2)
.ORG (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
They're called Professional Associations.
Actual professions like Law, Medicine, Accounting and Engineering have them. Not only are they "unions", but they have a set of standards that members much achieve in order to practise and they enforce a code of ethics that members must abide by.
Re: (Score:1)
I suggest instead moving to co-ops and employee-owned companies.
You can't really have an impasse between management and labor when management *is* labor!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
80+ hours a week ?!! How do you even write functioning software after 40+ hours in a week ? When your brain is your tool and it is fatigued how can that work ?
Better work 40 hours a week and write something proper, go home and refill your battery, enjoy life and be fresh the following day. 80+ hours is just 'making hours' not getting actual work done.
Re: (Score:1)
or.. you could learn to work smarter not harder. ;) That's why I get paid the big bucks and make it all look so easy.
Re: (Score:3)
...and start saying no to 80+ work weeks collectively.
That only works when there aren't a hundred H1B's (or other non-USA-equivalent) from shithole countries waiting to take each job. If all non-shithole-country IS/IT worker joined the union and said no to abusive working conditions, there would be only shithole country workers in IS/IT.
And no, that wouldn't convince companies to start paying high salaries for highly skilled workers. It would merely convince them to hire more shithole-country workers to fill the void.
In other news... (Score:1)
Legacy systems are out of control (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
So I'm supposed to upgrade the single Windows 2003 system I have, running as a non-networked VM, hosting a proprietary application on a system we need to lookup legacy data that never changes so I can pay to upgrade to a modern system, figure out a way to migrate the data from one proprietary application to a new and different system just so I can have support I don't need on a system that can't realistically be exploited in the first place?
OR I'm supposed to pay a premium for extended support on the curren
Re: (Score:3)
That is a different problem. Their new offerings are just really bad. Also, nobody sane used MS crap on server-side.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Newer file browsers no longer let you edit the file path, you have to click on everything to get somewhere
Ctrl+L, no, you don't need to thank me.
Yet us 50+ folks are unemployed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yet us 50+ folks are unemployed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
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.
I get recruiters wanting to submit me all the time. Then after a week, I follow up and the "the position is closed." I think recruiters are assholes who got fired from see car lots for ethics violations.
So, when you get a real job with health insurance, you'll be an outlier.
Of course, that's assumimg you're not full of shit.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
I just turned 53 and I get about 10 a day from names I could never pronounce... "Rajesh Rajamanickkam", "Nitish Sharma", "guru prasad", "Tripti Sharma", "Vivek Mishra"
All with some random company some random Microsoft technology in some random small city..all wanting contact info that is in my resume. All wanting to know if I am authorized to work in the USA so I can go work with a bunch of clueless foreign code monkeys that purchased a masters degree... No thanks.
IDC Technologies is currently looking to fi
So, the old adage? (Score:2)
Employees are our most valuable asset? I'm pretty sure it's actually still money.
Re: (Score:2)
Employees are our most valuable asset? I'm pretty sure it's actually still money.
Then stationary.
Nonsensical headline... (Score:2)
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.
Talk about not understanding an article / Poll (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
lots of employees are "worth more than money"... (Score:2)
Tech debt is a business decision (Score:2)
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 compamy (Score:2)
Not at my company, and certainly not at any other publicly-traded company.
Maybe at some privately-held company until it gets bought out.
Employees are our Most Valuable Asset (Score:3)
Right behind carbon paper. [dilbert.com]
And this is why we keep them chained to (Score:2)
Post-scarcity society. (Score:2)
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 happe
Title? (Score:2)
And yet (Score:1)
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 managem
assets like any other (Score:2)