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Businesses Software The Almighty Buck Technology

Software Developers Are Now More Valuable To Companies Than Money, Says Survey (cnbc.com) 97

Posted by BeauHD from the new-breed-of-corporate-leaders dept.
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.

Software Developers Are Now More Valuable To Companies Than Money, Says Survey More | Reply

Software Developers Are Now More Valuable To Companies Than Money, Says Survey

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  • So why not treat them well? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @06:03PM (#57266246)

    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?

    • This is really true. As the fact that the IT leads the world.

    • Re:So why not treat them well? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by spagthorpe ( 111133 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @08:53PM (#57266940)

      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.

  • And open concept offices.

    • Re:And yet there's agile (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @06:45PM (#57266444)
      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."

      • ....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)

          by Klaxton ( 609696 )

          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:2)

        by Ocker3 ( 1232550 )
        "But I can See everyone and I know that they're working" - Manager If someone doesn't know enough about their direct report's job that they don't know whether they're working or not without seeing them at their desk, there's a problem. Not all jobs are reduced in efficiency by a cubicle farm, but if your job is primarily about mental focus for the time-intensive tasks, then most people will benefit from having their own room. And the employer will probably benefit enough that an actual room is a worthwhile

      • Sounds like a real horror show. Safe to say you made the right move.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Klaxton ( 609696 )
      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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06, 2018 @06:08PM (#57266262)

    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.

  • 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)

      by zlives ( 2009072 )

      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)

    by thevirtualcat ( 1071504 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @06:10PM (#57266284)

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

  • .ORG (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @06:15PM (#57266302)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ocker3 ( 1232550 )
      How do we re-invent Unions without calling them Unions and avoid the very real baggage that the term has in the USA? Guilds?
  • The sun rose today.
  • Microsoft has just announced paid extended support for Windows 7 as too many companies are using it. There’s a lot of server 2003 systems out there too, with companies rather risking security exploits than upgrade.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      That is a different problem. Their new offerings are just really bad. Also, nobody sane used MS crap on server-side.

  • Yet us 50+ folks are unemployed (Score:4, Informative)

    by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Thursday September 06, 2018 @07:05PM (#57266518)
    Forget how long I've been out of work, it's been 2-3 years now since I quit looking.
    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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.

        • I agree; I regard recruiters as people that weren't ethical enough to get jobs as used car salesmen. I interviewed for a job once, didn't get any response, so I started another position. A month after the initial interview, the recruiter for the first position offered me $1500 cash in a plain, unmarked envelope to quit the job I'd just started and take the other position instead! (Apparently the cash came out of his commission.) So yes, recruiters know nothing, rely almost entirely on keyword searching in r

  • Employees are our most valuable asset? I'm pretty sure it's actually still money.

  • 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.

  • 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 effecti

  • What management school fails to teach young inexperienced executives: If the company's future existence depends on whether or not an employee does the job correctly or not, they are "worth more than money".

  • 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 company, and certainly not at any other publicly-traded company.
    Maybe at some privately-held company until it gets bought out.

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