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> very few companies actually value them accordingly This is something that has definitely gone through waves a few time during my life time. In particular I

> very few companies actually value them accordingly This is something that has definitely gone through waves a few time during my life time. In particular I remember the early startup era (~2010) developers were treated very well (though I don't think they were ever treated that great in the games industry). Ironically they weren't paid as ridiculously as today, but they tended to play a much larger role in the company, and their time was treated as very valuable. Back then startups would be a team of engineers, a designer, a marketer with all of the product vision coming from CEO or maybe as very senior product role (typically cofounder). The contemporary world filled with PMs would have seemed (and still does to some of us) foreign to anyone at the time. The truth is industry tends to despise a "monopoly on talent", and so we've seen the bureaucratization of the industry. The rise of boot camps has worked to devalued the skills of a talented engineer (though it might be harder now than before to hire talent), interviews are formalized into a robotic screening processes, and the current structure of teams, largely driven by PMs/product owners, has radically devalued the input form engineers in the way the product is developed. If you have been in the industry less that 10 years you'd be surprised how much say engineers used to get in at the start of the most recent tech boom, as well as how different the hiring process was. In 2011 the two biggest signals for interviews were a strong github page and especially OSS contribution. Passionate, curious software engineers were the most sought after people and they were considered very much a part of the leadership of a company, driving it's culture and success. Today engineers have been more or less reduced to hot-swappable drones across the industry.

ModernMech 5y ago
Interesting post. I think what happened was that there used to be an idea that good tech was an important competitive advantage. Therefore, highly competent developers were listened to. But the industry came to realize that it's not better tech that wins, but underhanded, addictive, and deceptive tech. Engineers in my experience aren't motivated to use their engineering power to deceive, so if your goal is to use software to monetize users by violating their privacy, you need someone else at the helm of that ship.
syntheweave 5y ago
I think the industry has foiled itself recently through sheer scale. The number of niche roles has exploded and with it, so too the depth of the software stack. The good talent in any subsection ends up going deeper than they can be trained or evaluated for. The rest tread water and add noise to the pipeline. As a result there is an increasing sense of nobody knowing what's going on and compensation being poorly correlated with talent, meaning many orgs can't handle their technical challenges and don't know it until it blows up. The actual solution would be to be suspicious of software as an end and relinquish more control of it to the open-source commons so that they can optimize their core business. But that can't happen if your core business is "being a platform," and as we know, platforms are where the big profits lie anyway. So it's going to go on like this until we cycle out of the current software stacks and move into ones with different social arrangements at their core.

ModernMech 5y ago

Interesting post. I think what happened was that there used to be an idea that good tech was an important competitive advantage. Therefore, highly competent developers were listened to. But the industry came to realize that it's not better tech that wins, but underhanded, addictive, and deceptive tech. Engineers in my experience aren't motivated to use their engineering power to deceive, so if your goal is to use software to monetize users by violating their privacy, you need someone else at the helm of that ship.

syntheweave 5y ago

I think the industry has foiled itself recently through sheer scale. The number of niche roles has exploded and with it, so too the depth of the software stack. The good talent in any subsection ends up going deeper than they can be trained or evaluated for. The rest tread water and add noise to the pipeline. As a result there is an increasing sense of nobody knowing what's going on and compensation being poorly correlated with talent, meaning many orgs can't handle their technical challenges and don't know it until it blows up. The actual solution would be to be suspicious of software as an end and relinquish more control of it to the open-source commons so that they can optimize their core business. But that can't happen if your core business is "being a platform," and as we know, platforms are where the big profits lie anyway. So it's going to go on like this until we cycle out of the current software stacks and move into ones with different social arrangements at their core.