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Curious how articles like these almost never give the most obvious advice to businesses, which is: pay developers more. Instead, this article for instance advi

by _m96l 8y ago

Curious how articles like these almost never give the most obvious advice to businesses, which is: pay developers more. Instead, this article for instance advises employers to "increase developer productivity" and "outsource": > If developers are your company's most constraining resource, the key question is how to increase their productivity. "Increasing productivity" typically puts pressure on developers. This is quite surprising: developers are seen as a scarce valuable resource, and in a free market that means they should be rewarded for their rare and hard-won skillset. Instead, the universal advice is to pressure them to be more productive, outsource them, etc.

cortesoft 8y ago
That would work for a single company, but not necessarily the market as a whole... paying developers more wont suddenly add a bunch of skilled developers into the market.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  Won't it? There's a whole bunch of smart people right now who won't go into tech because they can make more elsewhere. Another example is senior engineers who retire because their investment portfolio is large enough, and they don't feel like working hard for another year just to make another $150k. If it was $400k, they might stay. These are the engineers who are the most scarce and at the greatest demand right now. Another example is turnover. Engineers currently have to job hop every couple of years to get a decent raise. That leads to more waste of engineer time and effort than any single management improvement that can possibly be implemented. These are just 3 examples off the top of my head. In every other field, it is obvious that more pay == more and better candidates. Yet somehow engineers are the single exception? Against any sensible market theory?
  - castlecrasher2 8y ago
    >There's a whole bunch of smart people right now who won't go into tech because they can make more elsewhere. Is this true? I've only ever heard the opposite.
    - captain_perl 8y ago
      According to Prof. Philip Greenspun, his smartest female CS graduates went into health sciences because it paid more and had other improved lifestyle benefits. So check out his blog if you want to read more.
      - barry-cotter 8y ago
        Blog post in question https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science It should be noted that the article doesn’t really talk about programming as a career. It’s mostly about how Science is a terrible career from the perspective of money or security and the professions are way better.
  - ianai 8y ago
    You make a great point. It’s often difficult to parse out whether a demand spike is confined to one supplier or the overall market. Personally, I started programming in HS (class of ‘02). I could have gone the programmer route after HS, after college, and even after grad. I’ve had opportunities during my professional life as well. The one serious negative doesn’t seem to go away - programmers are treated by companies in ways my health can’t tolerate. I need every day to start and end roughly around the same time and with good healthcare.
    - sixdimensional 8y ago
      I have 18 years of experience in software development and engineering. Due to my concern that I wouldn't make it doing anything else, I've stayed stuck in the technical path. Let me just say that after at least 10 years of routine 10-12 hour days and occasional weekend work, I think maybe you made a better decision than I did. I make less than industry rates working for a large corporation and you'd be shocked by how much pressure and technical responsibility I have as one person. And no matter what I do to try to get help, the burden stays on me because it's perceived that "I can handle it". So again, maybe you made a better decision. Out of curiosity, what do you do instead?
      - dunpeal 8y ago
        > I make less than industry rates working for a large corporation and you'd be shocked by how much pressure and technical responsibility I have as one person. And no matter what I do to try to get help, the burden stays on me because it's perceived that "I can handle it". Why don't you find another job then? If you're making below market wages, you should be able to find another employer to pay you about the same for a much more relaxed work environment.
        sixdimensional 8y ago
        I suffer from imposter syndrome, for one. Even with the experience I have, I never feel good enough. Also, I frequently get stuck working hard to the point of burn out at a place and then don't have the energy to find the next thing. Also, come out exhausted from the current gig, not motivated for the next one. I think partially, the market where I am, employers are quite greedy and it can be difficult to find places that have good work/environments and the higher pay. It's a bit of a tradeoff, choose one or the other. It's been getting better as more cutting edge companies have moved to the area over the years, but still, the good stuff happens elsewhere. I tried to get career counseling before to get some help, however, they recommended I start my own business rather than continue to look for a traditional job. I know that would be a hard road (been through several startups already). I'm not afraid of the hard work, I just have some familial limitations that make it infeasible at the moment (trying to adopt). That said, your point is well taken, and my friends and colleagues often recommend the same. I'm not sure if I'm an optimist and keep hoping the place I'm at will recognize and reward my contribution (unlikely), or I'm some kind of work sado-masochist. Not sure!
  - edoceo 8y ago
    ""In every other field, it is obvious that more pay == more and better candidates"" I don't see evidence to bank this claim. I've spent 10yr+ doing hiring, for devs and other roles. Candidate quality and wage offered rarely coincide. Currently I've got four high quality employee who are all under market wage wise. But! My (small) company is fun! There is upward mobility (eg CSRs becoming SDET), new skills opportunity (eg: Senior devs doing customer interviews/site-visits). Folks can see their work being used and participate directly in the feedback loop. IMO a "rewarding opportunity" attracts better candidates, money offered just gets me more candidates.
    - smrtinsert 8y ago
      Sorry but that's garbage. Only 20 year olds fall for that find your passion crap
      - NullPrefix 8y ago
        Maybe that's the target audience
      - edoceo 8y ago
        It's not passion crap, these are older players (mid-30s+) who know better. At some point folks can make the choice to not only chase money. Here we work 40h, some employees are 90%+ remote, come to the office if you want, actually USE the vacation they earn, 100% health, equity Balance is the real offering. You think I'm selling passion-bullshit, I'm not. I'm selling: ill pay you less but treat you better. Many folks are happy to just not be a cog in a huge machine.
  - ummonk 8y ago
    I was doing rocket science but switched to software engineering because I want to someday afford a decent house in the Bay Area. So yes, higher compensation definitely increases the supply of software engineers. Different people have different price points at which they would switch, but the potential supply is definitely there. Companies need to do a much better job of not screening out applicants with non traditional resumes though - I had to go through triplebyte to get my foot in the door.
    - dunpeal 8y ago
      > Companies need to do a much better job of not screening out applicants with non traditional resumes though - I had to go through triplebyte to get my foot in the door. Right. Imagine any other field where employers regularly complain about "severe talent shortage", yet a qualified candidate has to go through a highly specialized 3rd-party recruiter just to get their resume considered rather than tossed out reflexively. Puts the whole "tech talent shortage" myth in perspective. There is no "tech talent shortage". There are a bunch of spoiled employers who are short on "22-26 year old programmers who got the exact education and skillset we are looking for and are willing to work for the wages we offer, which incidentally will never afford them a house anywhere within 50 miles of our offices (but they won't care, because by then they'll be back in their home country)".
  - sidlls 8y ago
    This describes me. I've essentially maxed out my compensation on the tech ladder unless I go to work at FAANG, in which case I might see a one-time bump of between 10% and 33%, at which point I'll essentially plateau again. I chose management last year instead. I got an immediate 10% boost in pay from the same-level position on the tech ladder, bumped into the highest bonus pool available for people not in senior leadership, and significantly more influence in the work my team takes up and with senior leadership. And although it's a bit harder to move up from here, there is at least a path up in terms of both challenge and compensation.
    - sanderjd 8y ago
      > go to work at FAANG ... at which point I'll essentially plateau again Out of curiosity, is this based on first- or second-hand experience with the compensation structures at those companies, or is it an assumption based on how other companies work?
      - sidlls 8y ago
        Mostly the last, as my second hand knowledge is dated or casual (e.g. from acquaintances at the local library, parents clubs and that kind of thing). I could be completely wrong!
        mercutio2 8y ago
        Circumstances differ, but high performing senior developers at FAANG get vastly more than a 30% bump in total compensation over similar roles at most non-public companies and over public companies whose main area of expertise isn’t software. It’s hard to say with any precision, but easily $300k total annual compensation for a high performer.
  - bsder 8y ago
    > In every other field, it is obvious that more pay == more and better candidates. I saw this idiocy in the injection molding industry, as well. Companies were bitching about their better line workers getting poached. Okay, fair enough. Which companies in your field are poaching them? Foxconn and Amazon. Okay, when you are losing your line workers to possibly two of the WORST EMPLOYERS IN THE WORLD, you might want to think about the fact that you are doing something wrong.
  - sanxiyn 8y ago
    After more than 10 years in software, I recently moved to finance because I basically maxed out local market software developer compensation.
    - sizzle 8y ago
      What do you do in finance now?
  - toomanybeersies 8y ago
    > There's a whole bunch of smart people right now who won't go into tech because they can make more elsewhere. Is that really the case? Software developers are one of the most highly paid professions.
    - torgian 8y ago
      Not necessarily. Look at them outside of the United States. Software engineers typically make anywhere between 20-60k a year depending on location (east Asia being the worst).
      - NTDF9 8y ago
        > Not necessarily. Look at them outside of the United States. Software engineers typically make anywhere between 20-60k a year depending on location (east Asia being the worst). But almost everything is highly paid in the US as compared to east Asia. Even minimum wage is higher in the US as compared to east Asia. To me, it looks like the median is higher in the US and so is the cost of living.
        dunpeal 8y ago
        > Even minimum wage is higher in the US as compared to east Asia. Cost of living is also way lower in most of East Asia.
    - dunpeal 8y ago
      We are talking about the lack of senior engineers right now. That means we need to look at the market 10 years ago to see why there aren't enough senior engineers right now. While the entry-level wages for engineers straight out of college were already high 10 years ago, wages after that tended to stagnate. Typical course for a talented engineer was to start somewhere near $100k, which is great comp for a fresh graduate. However, after 6-7 years that talented engineer would be somewhere around $150k or so, while typically having a lot more responsibility, stress and workload (compared to a fresh graduate, who earns $50k less to basically learn the ropes). After that, you completely stagnate. Very few engineers were making much above $150k, and practically nobody was making over $200k. Meanwhile, your peers who went to medicine, finance, or business would be seeing a steady rise that routinely soared far above $200k, especially if they were successful. Meanwhile, an engineer could launch multiple successful products and not make much more than $150-200k. The situation is changing a bit nowadays, but the shortage of senior engineers in particular dates back to these times. There's no guarantee that the current positive trend will continue. The entire industry seems obsessed with the question of how to pay engineers less. Even this specific article about engineer shortage focuses on whipping them to be "more productive" and getting rid of engineering positions through "outsourcing", that old reliable threat that's been used to keep engineer wages down for almost two decades now. If we go back even further than 10 years, engineering was that low, dirty profession reserved for unwashed foreigners with thick accents and other smelly nerds. Companies were grabbing a fresh batch of them every year for $70-80k and they were expected to be thankful for getting that much, and were lucky if their pay peaked at $150k, while mid-level managers who couldn't write a line of code got much more than that. If you were among the lucky ones to earn $150k you were definitely some sort of semi-manager yourself, "team lead" / "technical lead" etc who was expected to work 16 hour days when it was necessary (often) and take on a ton of stress and responsibility.
  - NTDF9 8y ago
    > There's a whole bunch of smart people right now who won't go into tech because they can make more elsewhere. Actually no! Software engineering is hard and takes years to build the skills of a senior engineer. For the vast majority, this is incredibly frustrating and thus they seek other professions despite having the aptitude for software
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - geebee 8y ago
    Other fields also pay well and can draw top talent away from software engineering. Take a look at "US News Best Jobs" and drill down by salary in top paying regions for each job. The information is a roundup of BLS data. https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/the-100-best-jobs https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/the-100-... Some examples: The top paying market for software developers (the #1 job, apparently) is San Jose, at $133k a year median pay. Here's the top pay/region for the next few jobs: #2 Dentist, Peabody MA, $285k/year #3 Physician Asst, Yuba City, $149k/yr (and $138k a year in Santa Rosa CA) #4 Nurse Practitioner, $180k/Yr in Altoona PA ($158k/yr in San Francisco, CA). A bit further down the list, a registered nurse (#18) earns a median of $138k/yr in San Francisco, CA. Lawyers (#33) make a median of $193k/yr in San Jose (top market) I think national pay for software developers may be skewed by how many of them work in the valley. When you compare them to what other well educated and skilled professionals earn in those markets, you'll see that their compensation is ok, but nothing notable. There are lots and lots and lots of jobs that pay better, and may offer more fulfilling work. My point isn't that software developers deserve to make more money. Maybe the deserve to be paid less because their work matters less, but that's hardly a selling point. It's never an apples-to-apples comparison. But overall, I'd say the market is working just fine. There's no "shortage" of software developers, any more than there's a shortage of any other skilled professional in a high cost area. IN fact, there are probably considerably more software developers at the current price point, because of 1) government and industry PR programs designed to convince young people that they are desperately needed in software, and 2) work visa programs that put Silicon Valley companies in control of who is allowed to work in the US and the conditions under which they are allowed to remain. In fact, I'd say as long as non-market mechanisms (such as visa programs that allow Facebook to decide that immigrants should be engineers but not florists) are used to suppress wages, we should expect an almost permanent "shortage", as people who have the freedom to be florists (or anything else they might wish to pursue as free people) go into fields where wages and working conditions don't reflect the negotiation power of people who can be deported if they lose their jobs.
    - dunpeal 8y ago
      > When you compare them to what other well educated and skilled professionals earn in those markets, you'll see that their compensation is ok, but nothing notable. There are lots and lots and lots of jobs that pay better, and may offer more fulfilling work. Really important comment. People tend to overlook how engineers aren't actually paid that well compared to many other professions. Especially considering the amount of learning and training and skill-building it takes to earn anywhere near what that Nurse Practitioner in Altoona PA makes. Also note that there are plenty of engineers who make low wages in SFBay. Sure, they make 6 figures, which sounds high to a lot of people working low-paying jobs outside the valley. These people aren't aware that $100k in SF means you probably have roommates.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    I guess I might be a good example. I wrote software for over a decade and after that time, my salary basically plateaued. Raises stopped. Changing jobs didn’t help anymore. Used to be able to get a 20-40% bump just taking another job—that ends at around the 10 year mark. So I did an MBA and left software development :( If there was an upward career trajectory for individual contributor developers, I’d go back in a heartbeat, but apart from a very few selective companies there is not. Change this, and we senior folks will return to the industry in droves.
- laretluval 8y ago
  > paying developers more wont suddenly add a bunch of skilled developers into the market. Maybe not suddenly. Give it four years.
- acchow 8y ago
  Not suddenly. But certainly a ton of technical people in, say, finance could learn software development fairly quickly.
- greenhatman 8y ago
  Hire more remote engineers.
closeparen 8y ago
Companies can load-balance menial tasks arbitrarily across undifferentiated labor, so much so that low-skilled workers have a hard time getting enough hours from the same gig. The harder and more expensive it is to hire a specialist, the more important it is that the company utilize him fully. High salaries and long hours usually go together.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  > The harder and more expensive it is to hire a specialist, the more important it is that the company utilize him fully. High salaries and long hours usually go together. Until the specialist quits, and then your logic breaks completely. Arguably, you're making him quit, since if you ever worked as a developer, you'd know there's only so many hours you can put in. Beyond that, you are burning out and generating more mistakes than valuable code. My anecdotal observation is that both pay and work-life balance has been improving at FAANGs. I remember reading 10 years ago about how developers feel pressured to overwork in companies like Google. This doesn't seem to be the case anymore with my friends working for FAANGs. Unless we're talking about executive-level pay (i.e. high seven figures), paying someone a few more thousands per year doesn't justify a destructive work-life balance. In fact, it's a self-defeating strategy that hasn't worked and seems to be largely abandoned by most savvy employers.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    Obviously there is a limit. But employers are incentivized to slide in just under that limit, rather than offer part time or an especially relaxed pace as a perk.
- empath75 8y ago
  People don’t produce ‘hours of code’
crunchlibrarian 8y ago
It's consistent with the wage trends in the economy at large: if you're at the director level you can expect stratospheric wage increases year over year. Everyone else, well real wages have been flat or declining, with some recent shorter term gains. Real income has increased by a whopping 5.1% in 12 years. [1] If you shift the timeframe back to 1978, real wages are unchanged. [2] Supply and demand has become fundamentally broken in the labor market. It doesn't work anymore. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/09/09/as-some-cheer-wage-growth-rate-median-income-is-only-up-by-5-1-since-2006 https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/09/09/as-some-... [2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-...
speby 8y ago
It is not just about paying more (although that is one tactic). There are so many other factors though that affect hiring and attracting developers to the work you have at your company: * Company size * Is it green-field or mostly legacy? * Is it new tech / new platforms or more conventional (Java and C#)? * Will the company allow you to work remotely, maybe even on your own terms? * Benefits, time off, usual suspects apply. Are they crappy or really good? It's safe to say that a lot of developers who might already have some of these things in place really don't care to move or change jobs for an extra $10K, $15K, or even $20K a year more. For most developers earning over $100K as it is, an extra 10% or even 20% isn't going to change where they eat, what car they drive, where they live, their house, their clothes, or even necessarily what kind of vacation(s) they go on every year. So ... shrug.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  > There are so many other factors though that affect hiring and attracting developers to the work you have at your company Sure, and some of them count as "compensation" in the broad sense. For example, if the company is willing to give me more paid time off, then that's equivalent to higher pay. Some of the other factors you mentioned (such as whether it's "green-field") aren't compensation and can't be adjusted to attract candidates. Pay is relatively easy to adjust, so it's an easy and fairly general answer to the complex problem of recruiting and retaining engineers. > For most developers earning over $100K as it is, an extra 10% or even 20% isn't going to change where they eat, what car they drive, where they live, their house, their clothes, or even necessarily what kind of vacation(s) they go on every year. I've seen developers change their choice of an offer based on $15-20k. It may not seem like a lot to you, but it's important for many people, and I totally respect that. My comment more broadly was not just about pay, but about the attitude that "developer shortage" is going to be solved by sticks (pressuring developers to be more productive, aggressive outsourcing), rather than carrots (better pay, benefits, work environment, etc.) The industry's fondness of trying to beat down engineer comp with sticks for decades (how many times was the outsourcing boogeyman paraded?) is the reason for the current predicament. People looked at all the "outsource all the things!!1" articles on "CIO Today" and decided programming ain't for them 10 years ago. That's why we lack senior engineers now. Solution for the problem? According to the article, it's more sticks! Who writes these things?!
jlebar 8y ago
>> If developers are your company's most constraining resource, the key question is how to increase their productivity. > "Increasing productivity" typically puts pressure on developers. I agree frequently -- perhaps typically -- when managers put pressure on developers, they often explain their behavior as, they are trying to increase productivity. And indeed, this is probably genuine. I'd also agree to the converse: That applying pressure in one form or another may be the most common thing that managers try to do to increase developer productivity. Finally, I agree that applying pressure to developers is not a good way to increase their productivity. Nonetheless, I'd respectfully disagree that attempting to increase developers' productivity is a fool's errand. Indeed, we often talk about the giant variance in individual developer productivity. If we agree that it's naive and ultimately self-defeating to pressure developers into increasing their productivity, I'd hope we could also agree that it's naive and ultimately self-defeating for managers to make no serious attempt to increase developer productivity. There are lots of things that can be done to this end that reduce pressure on individual developers. Establishing good processes and tools, both hardware and software. Having quiet workspaces. Ensuring that managers don't suck the souls out of their reports. Establishing protocols that allow developers to work on a maker's schedule. Establishing coaching processes. Building a respectful work environment, where people aren't constantly worried about backstabbing, harassment, or being called an idiot. You get the idea.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  > Nonetheless, I'd respectfully disagree that attempting to increase developers' productivity is a fool's errand. I never claimed that increasing developer productivity is a fool's errand. Quite the contrary: earlier in my career, my supervisor improved my productivity by carefully observing my development strategies and finding areas where I could work more efficiently. He managed to do that because he was a very senior engineer (over 20 years of experience at the time) and knew exactly what was going on in my development and the way I approached it back then. The guy was incredibly expensive, but thankfully I worked in a place where paying engineers like him exceedingly well was the norm, so he and others stuck around. This isn't the norm in the industry and as you yourself observed, the typical way to "increase productivity" is get some fresh-faced MBA to apply some banal "productivity improving" tips from the article he read on the latest "CIO Today", which typically boil down to "apply pressure" and "make them work longer hours". It often just makes work more stressful and makes the engineers feel worse, but it's the easiest and cheapest way to try to "increase productivity", so that's what's being used. Reality is that clueless managers who could never cut it as devs themselves are rampant in the industry. Remember the Pointy-Haired Boss? That guy wasn't some outlandish joke - he and his ilk used to rule this industry! In fact they still do in many places. Somehow engineers got cowed into accepting that their direct supervisor is someone who never did what they do, probably never could, and doesn't really understand it. I know of no other profession like this. So yeah, improving engineer productivity is possible. But no, most engineering managers reading this article would not do what it takes to establish an engineering culture, pay for Tribe Elders to stick around, and do all the other complex and subtle and expensive things that actually improve productivity. In fact, why pay the Tribe Elder at all when we can just fire him and hire 3 fresh-faced graduates instead?! They'd tell their PHBs to whip engineers harder and get them to stay in the office longer, or worse: introduce bogus metrics like "LoC written" as a performance measure (I've seen this happen THIS IS NOT A JOKE).
galaxyLogic 8y ago
> Curious how articles like these almost never give the most obvious advice to businesses, which is: pay developers more. Isn't that like saying, Hey there's an oil crisis, what are you taking about, just pay more for oil. The SW development crisis is that companies have to pay more for high-octane developers and they don't want to, or can not afford to pay ludicrous prices.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  > Isn't that like saying, Hey there's an oil crisis, what are you taking about, just pay more for oil. Which is exactly what happens during an oil crisis... :) Oil prices rise, and people who don't need oil so much stop purchasing it. > The SW development crisis is that companies have to pay more for high-octane developers and they don't want to, or can not afford to pay ludicrous prices. Right, with one small difference: In the US, employers get to whine to the government about this eternal "crisis", then the government issues hundreds of thousands more work visas (in addition to the "minimal quota" of hundreds of thousands that is already issued every year like clockworks), and then the employers are happy: they get to fire older, well-paid employees, and hire fresh H1B holders who are tethered to their jobs and can be deported for poor performance, much like slaves. They keep wages down this way, until next year, when they whine some more about how Americans don't want to become engineers. One wonders why.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Which is exactly what happens during an oil crisis Paying more happens; so does seeking to exploit currently-underutilized supplies (equivalent to outsourcing) or find ways to improve efficiency of systems that depend on oil (equivalent of increasing developer productivity), both a responses to the first effect of the supply constraint, high market price.
alexpetralia 8y ago
To be honest, compensation is already _extremely_ high in the U.S. relative to the rest of the world (at least 2x, often 3 to 10x). That is a huge multiple for the simple privilege of being a local developer - it is not due to U.S. developers being better. Said otherwise, developers in China and Russia and Central Europe - often who speak very good English - are now increasingly competing with U.S. developers as the world embraces more remote work. I suspect that before salaries increase more in the U.S., we'll see it first increase in these developer-rich emerging markets.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  > To be honest, compensation is already _extremely_ high in the U.S. relative to the rest of the world Check out compensation for medical doctors, dentists, nurses, attorneys, sales people, and an endless list of others in the US compared to Russia, China, and Central Europe. Hint: the median pay for any of these is often 5x or more here. Compare cost of living too, while you're at it. Practically any profession in the US makes more money than anywhere else. Certainly in big cities like SF and NYC. > Said otherwise, developers in China and Russia and Central Europe - often who speak very good English - are now increasingly competing with U.S. developers as the world embraces more remote work. There were articles about outsourcing 10 years ago too. In fact, the perceived rush to "outsource all the things!" that many companies embraced (to their detriment) is why a lot of good people saw software engineering as a hopeless field consigning them to compete with foreigners for pennies. That's why we have the current shortage of senior engineers: sensible folks didn't want to have to race to the bottom on comp against foreigners living in locations where $50k buys you a palace. > I suspect that before salaries increase more in the U.S., we'll see it first increase in these developer-rich emerging markets. They already are. Check out what's going on in Bangalore right now. The tech industry has been scaring developers into submission by waving the outsourcing stick for decades. Then they discovered good talent is rare everywhere. Now good engineers in Bangalore are making salaries that are in the same ballpark as American salaries. Let pay rise there too, I say. Good for them.
jakobegger 8y ago
I dunno. Developers already earn ridiculous salaries compared to pretty much any other profession. At some point businesses just can't afford to pay any more, no matter how much they would like to offer their employees.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  > I dunno. Developers already earn ridiculous salaries compared to pretty much any other profession. A common misconception. Check out other comments in this thread. Folks in many other professions, such as nursing, can make about the same as "senior engineers". > At some point businesses just can't afford to pay any more I heard the same claim back when $150k was a top salary in SF. Then companies needed to pay more, and somehow they managed to do so. Check out a tech company's balance sheet. The margins are typically more than enough to cover some raises.
  - jakobegger 8y ago
    "Somehow they managed to pay more"... that's one way to look at it. The other possibility is that only those businesses that could afford to pay more are left now. If you can scale to a million users per engineer, sure, pay them more. If you can't operate at that scale, tough luck. You need to do exactly what the article suggests: outsource and buy services. In house dev teams are now so expensive that many companies just can't afford them.
    - dunpeal 8y ago
      > The other possibility is that only those businesses that could afford to pay more are left now. What's wrong with that? I can't afford to hire a butler, so I don't get one. The government doesn't owe me one. Nor does it issue a special visa so someone can come and be my butler for the $50/week I can afford...
      - jakobegger 8y ago
        The problem is that only the most profitable companies remain. If you don't see the problems that can lead to, I don't know what to say. I'm not demanding "the government" do anything about it, and I don't think that cheap foreign labor will help at all. I don't have any solutions. But access to developers is an issue, and saying that companies should just pay more is naive and doesn't solve any problems.
cwp 8y ago
One the one hand, yes. Supply and demand being what they are, we should expect developer salaries to go up. And in some places they have. A lot. Yay, because I write software and this is good for me. But on the other hand, no. Paying more just ensures that the scarce and valuable resource is allocated to the companies that can make the most profits from it. That's good, as far as it goes, because that loosely corresponds to providing the most value for society. But it doesn't make more engineers. Maybe it will in the long run. Big salaries will cause lots of kids who are in high school now to choose to study computer science in a few years and 20-25 years after that we'll have a lot more experienced software developers than we do today. Great, I hope that happens. In the meantime, there are not enough developers around to write all the software that we need. There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't get done because the software isn't there. Projects cancelled, startups failed, services not performed. Sometimes, you can't hire the developers you need regardless of what you're willing to pay. That's what the article is talking about.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  > And in some places they have. A lot. Yay, because I write software and this is good for me. In those places, wages often rose to compensate for commensurate rises in cost of living. Where did wages rise the most? SF Bay. How much did they rise? 30-50%. How much did cost of living, especially rent, rise during that time? Roughly the same. Can developers in SF Bay afford to buy a house? No. Yet somehow they are content with these modest raises... > Paying more just ensures that the scarce and valuable resource is allocated to the companies that can make the most profits from it. Even if that's the only advantage, speaking as engineers, that is a huge advantage. It means engineers are paid more. Even if all else remains equal, that's a good outcome for engineers. > But it doesn't make more engineers. This was already covered below. Better pay convinces more and better people to enter the field, encourages existing senior developers (the exact sort that are most needed) to stick around and keep doing meaningful work, and reduces turnover, so years of engineering knowledge and training aren't wasted because the only way to get a decent raise is to job hop. These are just 3 random examples of how better pay will "make more engineers". I still don't get how getting paid more is bad for engineers or the field as a whole. In every other case, rise in demand/supply ratio will increase price. Why shouldn't it happen for engineers? Even if that was the only effect, it would be good. But obviously, there are many more important positive effects to raising pay. In fact, a big reason for the current "shortage" is that pay was kept artificially low for a long time, now you suggest we keep doing that... why?
southerndrift 8y ago
The downside to paying more is that bad programmers don't leave because they will never find a better-paying job. People will stay even if they don't feel comfortable with either their job or their colleagues. You have to fire them for vague reasons. That's a kind of stress that not every manager can bear so you have to prepare your management layer accordingly.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  > You have to fire them for vague reasons. This is the US. You can fire them for no reason. The only reason to do it for "vague reasons" instead is to try and avoid the unemployment insurance hit.
- expertentipp 8y ago
  This stereotyping is just exhausting. If in my career I have both - years-long stay in a boring corporation and multiple job-hopping periods couple of months each, am I double incompetent, double competent, or these nullify each other?
  - southerndrift 8y ago
    That's undecidable because it is only an implication in one direction.
- dunpeal 8y ago
  This comment is irrelevant to the US. You can fire people for any reason, or no reason at all. Incompetent programmers can and do get fired for performance reasons all the time. It's simply not an issue, and in reality if you're a "bad programmer" you'd have trouble getting hired, let alone staying anywhere for more than a couple of months.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Never worked at a big company in the US I'm guessing. Because they are havens for bad programmers, who inevitably advance to some position of authority and can crush the spirit and productivity of whole departments. Now with 'agile' and code review hurdle on checkin etc, it can actually be impossible to improve the situation. Even Silicon Valley has become infected with this.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> Curious how articles like these almost never give the most obvious advice to businesses, which is: pay developers more. “access to” includes, and really is largely a way of saying, “cost of”. Paying more isn't the solution to their complaint, it is the problem they are complaining about. > > If developers are your company's most constraining resource, the key question is how to increase their productivity. > This is quite surprising: developers are seen as a scarce valuable resource, and in a free market that means they should be rewarded for their rare and hard-won skillset. Yes, they are. That makes them expensive, leading naturally to people seeking efficiencies in their utilization. > Instead, the universal advice is to pressure them to be more productive, outsource them, etc. That's not instead of them being expensive in the market, that is a consequence of them being expensive in the market: if a company is constrained by a scarce resource—one which it is expensive to get more of—then either (a) finding ways to get more output per unit of the scarce resource or (b) finding substitutes fornor untapped supplies of the scarce resource are obvious ways of addressing the complaint. The cost of acquiring more of the scarce resource from existing (e.g., not untapped) supplies is the problem you are trying to mitigate.

by _m96l 8y ago

cortesoft 8y ago

That would work for a single company, but not necessarily the market as a whole... paying developers more wont suddenly add a bunch of skilled developers into the market.

dunpeal 8y ago
Won't it? There's a whole bunch of smart people right now who won't go into tech because they can make more elsewhere. Another example is senior engineers who retire because their investment portfolio is large enough, and they don't feel like working hard for another year just to make another $150k. If it was $400k, they might stay. These are the engineers who are the most scarce and at the greatest demand right now. Another example is turnover. Engineers currently have to job hop every couple of years to get a decent raise. That leads to more waste of engineer time and effort than any single management improvement that can possibly be implemented. These are just 3 examples off the top of my head. In every other field, it is obvious that more pay == more and better candidates. Yet somehow engineers are the single exception? Against any sensible market theory?
- castlecrasher2 8y ago
  >There's a whole bunch of smart people right now who won't go into tech because they can make more elsewhere. Is this true? I've only ever heard the opposite.
  - captain_perl 8y ago
    According to Prof. Philip Greenspun, his smartest female CS graduates went into health sciences because it paid more and had other improved lifestyle benefits. So check out his blog if you want to read more.
    - barry-cotter 8y ago
      Blog post in question https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science It should be noted that the article doesn’t really talk about programming as a career. It’s mostly about how Science is a terrible career from the perspective of money or security and the professions are way better.
- ianai 8y ago
  You make a great point. It’s often difficult to parse out whether a demand spike is confined to one supplier or the overall market. Personally, I started programming in HS (class of ‘02). I could have gone the programmer route after HS, after college, and even after grad. I’ve had opportunities during my professional life as well. The one serious negative doesn’t seem to go away - programmers are treated by companies in ways my health can’t tolerate. I need every day to start and end roughly around the same time and with good healthcare.
  - sixdimensional 8y ago
    I have 18 years of experience in software development and engineering. Due to my concern that I wouldn't make it doing anything else, I've stayed stuck in the technical path. Let me just say that after at least 10 years of routine 10-12 hour days and occasional weekend work, I think maybe you made a better decision than I did. I make less than industry rates working for a large corporation and you'd be shocked by how much pressure and technical responsibility I have as one person. And no matter what I do to try to get help, the burden stays on me because it's perceived that "I can handle it". So again, maybe you made a better decision. Out of curiosity, what do you do instead?
    - dunpeal 8y ago
      > I make less than industry rates working for a large corporation and you'd be shocked by how much pressure and technical responsibility I have as one person. And no matter what I do to try to get help, the burden stays on me because it's perceived that "I can handle it". Why don't you find another job then? If you're making below market wages, you should be able to find another employer to pay you about the same for a much more relaxed work environment.
      - sixdimensional 8y ago
        I suffer from imposter syndrome, for one. Even with the experience I have, I never feel good enough. Also, I frequently get stuck working hard to the point of burn out at a place and then don't have the energy to find the next thing. Also, come out exhausted from the current gig, not motivated for the next one. I think partially, the market where I am, employers are quite greedy and it can be difficult to find places that have good work/environments and the higher pay. It's a bit of a tradeoff, choose one or the other. It's been getting better as more cutting edge companies have moved to the area over the years, but still, the good stuff happens elsewhere. I tried to get career counseling before to get some help, however, they recommended I start my own business rather than continue to look for a traditional job. I know that would be a hard road (been through several startups already). I'm not afraid of the hard work, I just have some familial limitations that make it infeasible at the moment (trying to adopt). That said, your point is well taken, and my friends and colleagues often recommend the same. I'm not sure if I'm an optimist and keep hoping the place I'm at will recognize and reward my contribution (unlikely), or I'm some kind of work sado-masochist. Not sure!
- edoceo 8y ago
  ""In every other field, it is obvious that more pay == more and better candidates"" I don't see evidence to bank this claim. I've spent 10yr+ doing hiring, for devs and other roles. Candidate quality and wage offered rarely coincide. Currently I've got four high quality employee who are all under market wage wise. But! My (small) company is fun! There is upward mobility (eg CSRs becoming SDET), new skills opportunity (eg: Senior devs doing customer interviews/site-visits). Folks can see their work being used and participate directly in the feedback loop. IMO a "rewarding opportunity" attracts better candidates, money offered just gets me more candidates.
  - smrtinsert 8y ago
    Sorry but that's garbage. Only 20 year olds fall for that find your passion crap
    - NullPrefix 8y ago
      Maybe that's the target audience
    - edoceo 8y ago
      It's not passion crap, these are older players (mid-30s+) who know better. At some point folks can make the choice to not only chase money. Here we work 40h, some employees are 90%+ remote, come to the office if you want, actually USE the vacation they earn, 100% health, equity Balance is the real offering. You think I'm selling passion-bullshit, I'm not. I'm selling: ill pay you less but treat you better. Many folks are happy to just not be a cog in a huge machine.
- ummonk 8y ago
  I was doing rocket science but switched to software engineering because I want to someday afford a decent house in the Bay Area. So yes, higher compensation definitely increases the supply of software engineers. Different people have different price points at which they would switch, but the potential supply is definitely there. Companies need to do a much better job of not screening out applicants with non traditional resumes though - I had to go through triplebyte to get my foot in the door.
  - dunpeal 8y ago
    > Companies need to do a much better job of not screening out applicants with non traditional resumes though - I had to go through triplebyte to get my foot in the door. Right. Imagine any other field where employers regularly complain about "severe talent shortage", yet a qualified candidate has to go through a highly specialized 3rd-party recruiter just to get their resume considered rather than tossed out reflexively. Puts the whole "tech talent shortage" myth in perspective. There is no "tech talent shortage". There are a bunch of spoiled employers who are short on "22-26 year old programmers who got the exact education and skillset we are looking for and are willing to work for the wages we offer, which incidentally will never afford them a house anywhere within 50 miles of our offices (but they won't care, because by then they'll be back in their home country)".
- sidlls 8y ago
  This describes me. I've essentially maxed out my compensation on the tech ladder unless I go to work at FAANG, in which case I might see a one-time bump of between 10% and 33%, at which point I'll essentially plateau again. I chose management last year instead. I got an immediate 10% boost in pay from the same-level position on the tech ladder, bumped into the highest bonus pool available for people not in senior leadership, and significantly more influence in the work my team takes up and with senior leadership. And although it's a bit harder to move up from here, there is at least a path up in terms of both challenge and compensation.
  - sanderjd 8y ago
    > go to work at FAANG ... at which point I'll essentially plateau again Out of curiosity, is this based on first- or second-hand experience with the compensation structures at those companies, or is it an assumption based on how other companies work?
    - sidlls 8y ago
      Mostly the last, as my second hand knowledge is dated or casual (e.g. from acquaintances at the local library, parents clubs and that kind of thing). I could be completely wrong!
      - mercutio2 8y ago
        Circumstances differ, but high performing senior developers at FAANG get vastly more than a 30% bump in total compensation over similar roles at most non-public companies and over public companies whose main area of expertise isn’t software. It’s hard to say with any precision, but easily $300k total annual compensation for a high performer.
- bsder 8y ago
  > In every other field, it is obvious that more pay == more and better candidates. I saw this idiocy in the injection molding industry, as well. Companies were bitching about their better line workers getting poached. Okay, fair enough. Which companies in your field are poaching them? Foxconn and Amazon. Okay, when you are losing your line workers to possibly two of the WORST EMPLOYERS IN THE WORLD, you might want to think about the fact that you are doing something wrong.
- sanxiyn 8y ago
  After more than 10 years in software, I recently moved to finance because I basically maxed out local market software developer compensation.
  - sizzle 8y ago
    What do you do in finance now?
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  > There's a whole bunch of smart people right now who won't go into tech because they can make more elsewhere. Is that really the case? Software developers are one of the most highly paid professions.
  - torgian 8y ago
    Not necessarily. Look at them outside of the United States. Software engineers typically make anywhere between 20-60k a year depending on location (east Asia being the worst).
    - NTDF9 8y ago
      > Not necessarily. Look at them outside of the United States. Software engineers typically make anywhere between 20-60k a year depending on location (east Asia being the worst). But almost everything is highly paid in the US as compared to east Asia. Even minimum wage is higher in the US as compared to east Asia. To me, it looks like the median is higher in the US and so is the cost of living.
      - dunpeal 8y ago
        > Even minimum wage is higher in the US as compared to east Asia. Cost of living is also way lower in most of East Asia.
  - dunpeal 8y ago
    We are talking about the lack of senior engineers right now. That means we need to look at the market 10 years ago to see why there aren't enough senior engineers right now. While the entry-level wages for engineers straight out of college were already high 10 years ago, wages after that tended to stagnate. Typical course for a talented engineer was to start somewhere near $100k, which is great comp for a fresh graduate. However, after 6-7 years that talented engineer would be somewhere around $150k or so, while typically having a lot more responsibility, stress and workload (compared to a fresh graduate, who earns $50k less to basically learn the ropes). After that, you completely stagnate. Very few engineers were making much above $150k, and practically nobody was making over $200k. Meanwhile, your peers who went to medicine, finance, or business would be seeing a steady rise that routinely soared far above $200k, especially if they were successful. Meanwhile, an engineer could launch multiple successful products and not make much more than $150-200k. The situation is changing a bit nowadays, but the shortage of senior engineers in particular dates back to these times. There's no guarantee that the current positive trend will continue. The entire industry seems obsessed with the question of how to pay engineers less. Even this specific article about engineer shortage focuses on whipping them to be "more productive" and getting rid of engineering positions through "outsourcing", that old reliable threat that's been used to keep engineer wages down for almost two decades now. If we go back even further than 10 years, engineering was that low, dirty profession reserved for unwashed foreigners with thick accents and other smelly nerds. Companies were grabbing a fresh batch of them every year for $70-80k and they were expected to be thankful for getting that much, and were lucky if their pay peaked at $150k, while mid-level managers who couldn't write a line of code got much more than that. If you were among the lucky ones to earn $150k you were definitely some sort of semi-manager yourself, "team lead" / "technical lead" etc who was expected to work 16 hour days when it was necessary (often) and take on a ton of stress and responsibility.
- NTDF9 8y ago
  > There's a whole bunch of smart people right now who won't go into tech because they can make more elsewhere. Actually no! Software engineering is hard and takes years to build the skills of a senior engineer. For the vast majority, this is incredibly frustrating and thus they seek other professions despite having the aptitude for software
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- geebee 8y ago
  Other fields also pay well and can draw top talent away from software engineering. Take a look at "US News Best Jobs" and drill down by salary in top paying regions for each job. The information is a roundup of BLS data. https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/the-100-best-jobs https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/the-100-... Some examples: The top paying market for software developers (the #1 job, apparently) is San Jose, at $133k a year median pay. Here's the top pay/region for the next few jobs: #2 Dentist, Peabody MA, $285k/year #3 Physician Asst, Yuba City, $149k/yr (and $138k a year in Santa Rosa CA) #4 Nurse Practitioner, $180k/Yr in Altoona PA ($158k/yr in San Francisco, CA). A bit further down the list, a registered nurse (#18) earns a median of $138k/yr in San Francisco, CA. Lawyers (#33) make a median of $193k/yr in San Jose (top market) I think national pay for software developers may be skewed by how many of them work in the valley. When you compare them to what other well educated and skilled professionals earn in those markets, you'll see that their compensation is ok, but nothing notable. There are lots and lots and lots of jobs that pay better, and may offer more fulfilling work. My point isn't that software developers deserve to make more money. Maybe the deserve to be paid less because their work matters less, but that's hardly a selling point. It's never an apples-to-apples comparison. But overall, I'd say the market is working just fine. There's no "shortage" of software developers, any more than there's a shortage of any other skilled professional in a high cost area. IN fact, there are probably considerably more software developers at the current price point, because of 1) government and industry PR programs designed to convince young people that they are desperately needed in software, and 2) work visa programs that put Silicon Valley companies in control of who is allowed to work in the US and the conditions under which they are allowed to remain. In fact, I'd say as long as non-market mechanisms (such as visa programs that allow Facebook to decide that immigrants should be engineers but not florists) are used to suppress wages, we should expect an almost permanent "shortage", as people who have the freedom to be florists (or anything else they might wish to pursue as free people) go into fields where wages and working conditions don't reflect the negotiation power of people who can be deported if they lose their jobs.
  - dunpeal 8y ago
    > When you compare them to what other well educated and skilled professionals earn in those markets, you'll see that their compensation is ok, but nothing notable. There are lots and lots and lots of jobs that pay better, and may offer more fulfilling work. Really important comment. People tend to overlook how engineers aren't actually paid that well compared to many other professions. Especially considering the amount of learning and training and skill-building it takes to earn anywhere near what that Nurse Practitioner in Altoona PA makes. Also note that there are plenty of engineers who make low wages in SFBay. Sure, they make 6 figures, which sounds high to a lot of people working low-paying jobs outside the valley. These people aren't aware that $100k in SF means you probably have roommates.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  I guess I might be a good example. I wrote software for over a decade and after that time, my salary basically plateaued. Raises stopped. Changing jobs didn’t help anymore. Used to be able to get a 20-40% bump just taking another job—that ends at around the 10 year mark. So I did an MBA and left software development :( If there was an upward career trajectory for individual contributor developers, I’d go back in a heartbeat, but apart from a very few selective companies there is not. Change this, and we senior folks will return to the industry in droves.
laretluval 8y ago
> paying developers more wont suddenly add a bunch of skilled developers into the market. Maybe not suddenly. Give it four years.
acchow 8y ago
Not suddenly. But certainly a ton of technical people in, say, finance could learn software development fairly quickly.
greenhatman 8y ago
Hire more remote engineers.

closeparen 8y ago

Companies can load-balance menial tasks arbitrarily across undifferentiated labor, so much so that low-skilled workers have a hard time getting enough hours from the same gig. The harder and more expensive it is to hire a specialist, the more important it is that the company utilize him fully. High salaries and long hours usually go together.

dunpeal 8y ago
> The harder and more expensive it is to hire a specialist, the more important it is that the company utilize him fully. High salaries and long hours usually go together. Until the specialist quits, and then your logic breaks completely. Arguably, you're making him quit, since if you ever worked as a developer, you'd know there's only so many hours you can put in. Beyond that, you are burning out and generating more mistakes than valuable code. My anecdotal observation is that both pay and work-life balance has been improving at FAANGs. I remember reading 10 years ago about how developers feel pressured to overwork in companies like Google. This doesn't seem to be the case anymore with my friends working for FAANGs. Unless we're talking about executive-level pay (i.e. high seven figures), paying someone a few more thousands per year doesn't justify a destructive work-life balance. In fact, it's a self-defeating strategy that hasn't worked and seems to be largely abandoned by most savvy employers.
- closeparen 8y ago
  Obviously there is a limit. But employers are incentivized to slide in just under that limit, rather than offer part time or an especially relaxed pace as a perk.
empath75 8y ago
People don’t produce ‘hours of code’

crunchlibrarian 8y ago

It's consistent with the wage trends in the economy at large: if you're at the director level you can expect stratospheric wage increases year over year. Everyone else, well real wages have been flat or declining, with some recent shorter term gains. Real income has increased by a whopping 5.1% in 12 years. [1] If you shift the timeframe back to 1978, real wages are unchanged. [2] Supply and demand has become fundamentally broken in the labor market. It doesn't work anymore. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/09/09/as-some-cheer-wage-growth-rate-median-income-is-only-up-by-5-1-since-2006 https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2018/09/09/as-some-... [2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-...

speby 8y ago

It is not just about paying more (although that is one tactic). There are so many other factors though that affect hiring and attracting developers to the work you have at your company: * Company size * Is it green-field or mostly legacy? * Is it new tech / new platforms or more conventional (Java and C#)? * Will the company allow you to work remotely, maybe even on your own terms? * Benefits, time off, usual suspects apply. Are they crappy or really good? It's safe to say that a lot of developers who might already have some of these things in place really don't care to move or change jobs for an extra $10K, $15K, or even $20K a year more. For most developers earning over $100K as it is, an extra 10% or even 20% isn't going to change where they eat, what car they drive, where they live, their house, their clothes, or even necessarily what kind of vacation(s) they go on every year. So ... shrug.

dunpeal 8y ago
> There are so many other factors though that affect hiring and attracting developers to the work you have at your company Sure, and some of them count as "compensation" in the broad sense. For example, if the company is willing to give me more paid time off, then that's equivalent to higher pay. Some of the other factors you mentioned (such as whether it's "green-field") aren't compensation and can't be adjusted to attract candidates. Pay is relatively easy to adjust, so it's an easy and fairly general answer to the complex problem of recruiting and retaining engineers. > For most developers earning over $100K as it is, an extra 10% or even 20% isn't going to change where they eat, what car they drive, where they live, their house, their clothes, or even necessarily what kind of vacation(s) they go on every year. I've seen developers change their choice of an offer based on $15-20k. It may not seem like a lot to you, but it's important for many people, and I totally respect that. My comment more broadly was not just about pay, but about the attitude that "developer shortage" is going to be solved by sticks (pressuring developers to be more productive, aggressive outsourcing), rather than carrots (better pay, benefits, work environment, etc.) The industry's fondness of trying to beat down engineer comp with sticks for decades (how many times was the outsourcing boogeyman paraded?) is the reason for the current predicament. People looked at all the "outsource all the things!!1" articles on "CIO Today" and decided programming ain't for them 10 years ago. That's why we lack senior engineers now. Solution for the problem? According to the article, it's more sticks! Who writes these things?!

jlebar 8y ago

>> If developers are your company's most constraining resource, the key question is how to increase their productivity. > "Increasing productivity" typically puts pressure on developers. I agree frequently -- perhaps typically -- when managers put pressure on developers, they often explain their behavior as, they are trying to increase productivity. And indeed, this is probably genuine. I'd also agree to the converse: That applying pressure in one form or another may be the most common thing that managers try to do to increase developer productivity. Finally, I agree that applying pressure to developers is not a good way to increase their productivity. Nonetheless, I'd respectfully disagree that attempting to increase developers' productivity is a fool's errand. Indeed, we often talk about the giant variance in individual developer productivity. If we agree that it's naive and ultimately self-defeating to pressure developers into increasing their productivity, I'd hope we could also agree that it's naive and ultimately self-defeating for managers to make no serious attempt to increase developer productivity. There are lots of things that can be done to this end that reduce pressure on individual developers. Establishing good processes and tools, both hardware and software. Having quiet workspaces. Ensuring that managers don't suck the souls out of their reports. Establishing protocols that allow developers to work on a maker's schedule. Establishing coaching processes. Building a respectful work environment, where people aren't constantly worried about backstabbing, harassment, or being called an idiot. You get the idea.

dunpeal 8y ago
> Nonetheless, I'd respectfully disagree that attempting to increase developers' productivity is a fool's errand. I never claimed that increasing developer productivity is a fool's errand. Quite the contrary: earlier in my career, my supervisor improved my productivity by carefully observing my development strategies and finding areas where I could work more efficiently. He managed to do that because he was a very senior engineer (over 20 years of experience at the time) and knew exactly what was going on in my development and the way I approached it back then. The guy was incredibly expensive, but thankfully I worked in a place where paying engineers like him exceedingly well was the norm, so he and others stuck around. This isn't the norm in the industry and as you yourself observed, the typical way to "increase productivity" is get some fresh-faced MBA to apply some banal "productivity improving" tips from the article he read on the latest "CIO Today", which typically boil down to "apply pressure" and "make them work longer hours". It often just makes work more stressful and makes the engineers feel worse, but it's the easiest and cheapest way to try to "increase productivity", so that's what's being used. Reality is that clueless managers who could never cut it as devs themselves are rampant in the industry. Remember the Pointy-Haired Boss? That guy wasn't some outlandish joke - he and his ilk used to rule this industry! In fact they still do in many places. Somehow engineers got cowed into accepting that their direct supervisor is someone who never did what they do, probably never could, and doesn't really understand it. I know of no other profession like this. So yeah, improving engineer productivity is possible. But no, most engineering managers reading this article would not do what it takes to establish an engineering culture, pay for Tribe Elders to stick around, and do all the other complex and subtle and expensive things that actually improve productivity. In fact, why pay the Tribe Elder at all when we can just fire him and hire 3 fresh-faced graduates instead?! They'd tell their PHBs to whip engineers harder and get them to stay in the office longer, or worse: introduce bogus metrics like "LoC written" as a performance measure (I've seen this happen THIS IS NOT A JOKE).

galaxyLogic 8y ago

> Curious how articles like these almost never give the most obvious advice to businesses, which is: pay developers more. Isn't that like saying, Hey there's an oil crisis, what are you taking about, just pay more for oil. The SW development crisis is that companies have to pay more for high-octane developers and they don't want to, or can not afford to pay ludicrous prices.

dunpeal 8y ago
> Isn't that like saying, Hey there's an oil crisis, what are you taking about, just pay more for oil. Which is exactly what happens during an oil crisis... :) Oil prices rise, and people who don't need oil so much stop purchasing it. > The SW development crisis is that companies have to pay more for high-octane developers and they don't want to, or can not afford to pay ludicrous prices. Right, with one small difference: In the US, employers get to whine to the government about this eternal "crisis", then the government issues hundreds of thousands more work visas (in addition to the "minimal quota" of hundreds of thousands that is already issued every year like clockworks), and then the employers are happy: they get to fire older, well-paid employees, and hire fresh H1B holders who are tethered to their jobs and can be deported for poor performance, much like slaves. They keep wages down this way, until next year, when they whine some more about how Americans don't want to become engineers. One wonders why.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Which is exactly what happens during an oil crisis Paying more happens; so does seeking to exploit currently-underutilized supplies (equivalent to outsourcing) or find ways to improve efficiency of systems that depend on oil (equivalent of increasing developer productivity), both a responses to the first effect of the supply constraint, high market price.

alexpetralia 8y ago

To be honest, compensation is already _extremely_ high in the U.S. relative to the rest of the world (at least 2x, often 3 to 10x). That is a huge multiple for the simple privilege of being a local developer - it is not due to U.S. developers being better. Said otherwise, developers in China and Russia and Central Europe - often who speak very good English - are now increasingly competing with U.S. developers as the world embraces more remote work. I suspect that before salaries increase more in the U.S., we'll see it first increase in these developer-rich emerging markets.

dunpeal 8y ago
> To be honest, compensation is already _extremely_ high in the U.S. relative to the rest of the world Check out compensation for medical doctors, dentists, nurses, attorneys, sales people, and an endless list of others in the US compared to Russia, China, and Central Europe. Hint: the median pay for any of these is often 5x or more here. Compare cost of living too, while you're at it. Practically any profession in the US makes more money than anywhere else. Certainly in big cities like SF and NYC. > Said otherwise, developers in China and Russia and Central Europe - often who speak very good English - are now increasingly competing with U.S. developers as the world embraces more remote work. There were articles about outsourcing 10 years ago too. In fact, the perceived rush to "outsource all the things!" that many companies embraced (to their detriment) is why a lot of good people saw software engineering as a hopeless field consigning them to compete with foreigners for pennies. That's why we have the current shortage of senior engineers: sensible folks didn't want to have to race to the bottom on comp against foreigners living in locations where $50k buys you a palace. > I suspect that before salaries increase more in the U.S., we'll see it first increase in these developer-rich emerging markets. They already are. Check out what's going on in Bangalore right now. The tech industry has been scaring developers into submission by waving the outsourcing stick for decades. Then they discovered good talent is rare everywhere. Now good engineers in Bangalore are making salaries that are in the same ballpark as American salaries. Let pay rise there too, I say. Good for them.

jakobegger 8y ago

I dunno. Developers already earn ridiculous salaries compared to pretty much any other profession. At some point businesses just can't afford to pay any more, no matter how much they would like to offer their employees.

dunpeal 8y ago
> I dunno. Developers already earn ridiculous salaries compared to pretty much any other profession. A common misconception. Check out other comments in this thread. Folks in many other professions, such as nursing, can make about the same as "senior engineers". > At some point businesses just can't afford to pay any more I heard the same claim back when $150k was a top salary in SF. Then companies needed to pay more, and somehow they managed to do so. Check out a tech company's balance sheet. The margins are typically more than enough to cover some raises.
- jakobegger 8y ago
  "Somehow they managed to pay more"... that's one way to look at it. The other possibility is that only those businesses that could afford to pay more are left now. If you can scale to a million users per engineer, sure, pay them more. If you can't operate at that scale, tough luck. You need to do exactly what the article suggests: outsource and buy services. In house dev teams are now so expensive that many companies just can't afford them.
  - dunpeal 8y ago
    > The other possibility is that only those businesses that could afford to pay more are left now. What's wrong with that? I can't afford to hire a butler, so I don't get one. The government doesn't owe me one. Nor does it issue a special visa so someone can come and be my butler for the $50/week I can afford...
    - jakobegger 8y ago
      The problem is that only the most profitable companies remain. If you don't see the problems that can lead to, I don't know what to say. I'm not demanding "the government" do anything about it, and I don't think that cheap foreign labor will help at all. I don't have any solutions. But access to developers is an issue, and saying that companies should just pay more is naive and doesn't solve any problems.

cwp 8y ago

One the one hand, yes. Supply and demand being what they are, we should expect developer salaries to go up. And in some places they have. A lot. Yay, because I write software and this is good for me. But on the other hand, no. Paying more just ensures that the scarce and valuable resource is allocated to the companies that can make the most profits from it. That's good, as far as it goes, because that loosely corresponds to providing the most value for society. But it doesn't make more engineers. Maybe it will in the long run. Big salaries will cause lots of kids who are in high school now to choose to study computer science in a few years and 20-25 years after that we'll have a lot more experienced software developers than we do today. Great, I hope that happens. In the meantime, there are not enough developers around to write all the software that we need. There is a lot of stuff that just doesn't get done because the software isn't there. Projects cancelled, startups failed, services not performed. Sometimes, you can't hire the developers you need regardless of what you're willing to pay. That's what the article is talking about.

dunpeal 8y ago
> And in some places they have. A lot. Yay, because I write software and this is good for me. In those places, wages often rose to compensate for commensurate rises in cost of living. Where did wages rise the most? SF Bay. How much did they rise? 30-50%. How much did cost of living, especially rent, rise during that time? Roughly the same. Can developers in SF Bay afford to buy a house? No. Yet somehow they are content with these modest raises... > Paying more just ensures that the scarce and valuable resource is allocated to the companies that can make the most profits from it. Even if that's the only advantage, speaking as engineers, that is a huge advantage. It means engineers are paid more. Even if all else remains equal, that's a good outcome for engineers. > But it doesn't make more engineers. This was already covered below. Better pay convinces more and better people to enter the field, encourages existing senior developers (the exact sort that are most needed) to stick around and keep doing meaningful work, and reduces turnover, so years of engineering knowledge and training aren't wasted because the only way to get a decent raise is to job hop. These are just 3 random examples of how better pay will "make more engineers". I still don't get how getting paid more is bad for engineers or the field as a whole. In every other case, rise in demand/supply ratio will increase price. Why shouldn't it happen for engineers? Even if that was the only effect, it would be good. But obviously, there are many more important positive effects to raising pay. In fact, a big reason for the current "shortage" is that pay was kept artificially low for a long time, now you suggest we keep doing that... why?

southerndrift 8y ago

The downside to paying more is that bad programmers don't leave because they will never find a better-paying job. People will stay even if they don't feel comfortable with either their job or their colleagues. You have to fire them for vague reasons. That's a kind of stress that not every manager can bear so you have to prepare your management layer accordingly.

vonmoltke 8y ago
> You have to fire them for vague reasons. This is the US. You can fire them for no reason. The only reason to do it for "vague reasons" instead is to try and avoid the unemployment insurance hit.
expertentipp 8y ago
This stereotyping is just exhausting. If in my career I have both - years-long stay in a boring corporation and multiple job-hopping periods couple of months each, am I double incompetent, double competent, or these nullify each other?
- southerndrift 8y ago
  That's undecidable because it is only an implication in one direction.
dunpeal 8y ago
This comment is irrelevant to the US. You can fire people for any reason, or no reason at all. Incompetent programmers can and do get fired for performance reasons all the time. It's simply not an issue, and in reality if you're a "bad programmer" you'd have trouble getting hired, let alone staying anywhere for more than a couple of months.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Never worked at a big company in the US I'm guessing. Because they are havens for bad programmers, who inevitably advance to some position of authority and can crush the spirit and productivity of whole departments. Now with 'agile' and code review hurdle on checkin etc, it can actually be impossible to improve the situation. Even Silicon Valley has become infected with this.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> Curious how articles like these almost never give the most obvious advice to businesses, which is: pay developers more. “access to” includes, and really is largely a way of saying, “cost of”. Paying more isn't the solution to their complaint, it is the problem they are complaining about. > > If developers are your company's most constraining resource, the key question is how to increase their productivity. > This is quite surprising: developers are seen as a scarce valuable resource, and in a free market that means they should be rewarded for their rare and hard-won skillset. Yes, they are. That makes them expensive, leading naturally to people seeking efficiencies in their utilization. > Instead, the universal advice is to pressure them to be more productive, outsource them, etc. That's not instead of them being expensive in the market, that is a consequence of them being expensive in the market: if a company is constrained by a scarce resource—one which it is expensive to get more of—then either (a) finding ways to get more output per unit of the scarce resource or (b) finding substitutes fornor untapped supplies of the scarce resource are obvious ways of addressing the complaint. The cost of acquiring more of the scarce resource from existing (e.g., not untapped) supplies is the problem you are trying to mitigate.