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> There seems to be something about the business world that removes people from the jobs they're good at. There's not much business value in just having one pe

> There seems to be something about the business world that removes people from the jobs they're good at. There's not much business value in just having one person be really good at something. It doesn't scale. The state of coding and information technology means you can't maintain exponential or even logarithmic scaling of your own abilities to produce business value. At some point, the only real thing left to do is to do your best to produce more people who can do what you do. 10 people that are 15% as good as you will outproduce you.

reaperducer 5y ago
10 people that are 15% as good as you will outproduce you. That only seems to make sense if those 10 less-productive people make one-tenth the salary of the single productive person. I've seen this in action. I know of a company that hired a whole room full of know-it-all high school drop-outs to write code, rather than one or two trained college graduates. That company went out of business in a matter of months.
- vinceguidry 5y ago
  The economics of software development completely abstract out the costs of developer salaries. Software is not a capital-intensive industry, it's labor-intensive. They don't need to wring costs out of the production pipeline, they need to wring more production out of it. Any added cost is worth it. Companies all want to have software biz economics, but few of them actually know how to run a software business. A room full of high school dropouts is each going to have 1% of the productive capacity of one top-level resource. College grads will have roughly 5%. With decent leadership and mentoring that can go up to 10%. Within a few years they'll hit 10-15%, becoming 'senior engineers'. Title inflation happens because titles, and their requisite salaries, don't matter for the industry. It's the same in finance, so you see a zillion vice presidents. It makes no sense for a company with hundreds of devs to take a top-level resource and waste their talents on writing code. Top level resources write code to stay sane and relevant, not because the company needs their code.

reaperducer 5y ago

10 people that are 15% as good as you will outproduce you. That only seems to make sense if those 10 less-productive people make one-tenth the salary of the single productive person. I've seen this in action. I know of a company that hired a whole room full of know-it-all high school drop-outs to write code, rather than one or two trained college graduates. That company went out of business in a matter of months.

vinceguidry 5y ago
The economics of software development completely abstract out the costs of developer salaries. Software is not a capital-intensive industry, it's labor-intensive. They don't need to wring costs out of the production pipeline, they need to wring more production out of it. Any added cost is worth it. Companies all want to have software biz economics, but few of them actually know how to run a software business. A room full of high school dropouts is each going to have 1% of the productive capacity of one top-level resource. College grads will have roughly 5%. With decent leadership and mentoring that can go up to 10%. Within a few years they'll hit 10-15%, becoming 'senior engineers'. Title inflation happens because titles, and their requisite salaries, don't matter for the industry. It's the same in finance, so you see a zillion vice presidents. It makes no sense for a company with hundreds of devs to take a top-level resource and waste their talents on writing code. Top level resources write code to stay sane and relevant, not because the company needs their code.