11 ms·

The Rise of Developeronomics

282 points by ryanackley 15y ago

pw 15y ago
Anyone know how to toggle a single-page/print view for this?
- keeptrying 15y ago
  Please post it when you find it. thanks.
- csarva 15y ago
  Readability seems to handle it ok: http://www.readability.com/articles/c1xma652 http://www.readability.com/articles/c1xma652
- driverdan 15y ago
  ReadItLater works.
- jwr 15y ago
  Amazing — I came to the point where I will actually refuse to read an article if I can't get it into Instapaper easily. I guess I won't read that one, then…
  - chris123 15y ago
    I skip those articles, too. Same for the "top xyz" lists/galleries. They should be one page, like http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/ http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/
jerf 15y ago
My "telling me what I want to hear" cognitive alarm bells are going off. On the other hand, this is simply the flip side of the frequently-heard argument around here that technology is driving people who can't cope out of the ability to hold a job at all, because they become unable to produce value in excess of what they cost. If that is true, then it follows that as the supply of people who can still be productive in the new economy drops, then they must also go up in price.
- shasta 15y ago
  I don't think that's right. If 50% of people became replaceable by robots, the other half doesn't become more valuable. Rather the value shifts to the robot owners. The article paints a simplistic picture, which is probably not correct even to first order, but it may be a useful viewpoint. The stratification should only increase, with the super devs obsoleting the ordinary code monkeys, but the time frame on that might be large.
  - jerf 15y ago
    You hypothesize an either-or where it's a both-and. The robot owners need somebody to program the robots, too, or they're expensive-yet-worthless hunks of metal. And if that talent is scarce compared to demand, the price is going to go up.
    - shasta 15y ago
      Maybe I'm nitpicking, but I'd say that effect is due to an increase in demand for robot programmers, not due to a decrease in the supply of the productive workers.
  - brc 15y ago
    The value shifts to the robot developers. They are the ones that capture more of the value originally pooled by the entire workforce. The robot owners get value in that they can lower their prices because of the replacement of labour with robots, and overall, society benefits because whatever the robots are making is now less costly (ie, takes less of your own hours working to purchase). The key to understanding all of this is productivity. Most people tend to think in terms of raw job numbers, rather than productivity numbers. Employing robots results in a more productive economy because the same (or greater) amount of output is achieved with less human input. This does release labour from that activity, but it also creates opportunities in other areas, as the savings people make on purchasing the robot-cheaper goods can now spend in other areas, which should create jobs in other areas. Of course rapidly advancing technology produces lumps of unemployed which take time to retrain and redeploy themselves elsewhere, and it sucks to be that person. But eventually they will find employment, assuming something else isn't working against that (like oversized debt accumulation, which works against new enterprise creation by causing a negative investment flow, but that's another story)
dpritchett 15y ago
The individualists turn into hard bargainers as they carefully probe their own market value and frequently re-negotiate relationships. They carefully invest in keeping their skill-base current and avoiding being shunted into the sunset end of the ecosystem for as long as possible. This sort of developer likes to hedge bets, stay invested in multiple projects and keep one foot in the open source world at all times. They position themselves for massive upsides when that is a possibility, and the ability to walk away from failures with their own reputations intact where there is real risk. Full agreement on this point. Once I started looking at my own career from this perspective I couldn't stop. Books like The Passionate Programmer and The Pragmatic Programmer as well as heaps of prose from pg, patio11, edw519, and tptacek guide my continuing quest for increased leverage.
- gitah 15y ago
  The article described old-guard programmers who mastered a technology and then couldn't find work when the technology died off. I have a hard time understanding this: programming skills are extremely transferable and learning the hot language/platform of the month isn't extremely difficult. Is it just inertia that prevents them from doing this?
  - vgr 15y ago
    It isn't an old guard thing. It is a personality and strengths thing. I am not particularly old guard (I am 37), and while I am about average in the technologies I do know, I suck at learning new platforms/technologies. It's like pulling teeth. Those who are good at it just don't get how hard it can be for those are not quick learners in this sense. This is part of not knowing their own value -- claiming that learning new languages is "easy." It is. For them.
    - lazyBilly 15y ago
      I dunno, I guess I'm of the mindset that the waves are coming, and you're either on them or under them. These days, I get antsy if I get enough time in one stack that I really feel like I have it cooking. Which is how I've clawed my way up from the embedded programming basement all the way up to javascript now. (Aside: sweet jesus, how do you web guys put up with javascript? It's like java and ml's thalidomide baby.)
sumeetjain 15y ago
At the end of the article, the author explains how "once a good developer recognizes his/her own value, [she turns] to either an individualist-mercenary mindset or a collectivist guild-like mindset." He elaborates on the "guild-like mindset": > The other kind of developer turns to guild-like structures, which serve as centers of balance-of-power politics in the constant wars against the developer-capitalists. Except that instead of taking on the dynamics of class warfare along an upper-lower dimension, the conflict takes the form of exit warfare along an inside-outside dimension. Rather than form a union to negotiate with management, the talented developer will simply exit a situation he/she does not like, and use guild-like resources to move to a better situation. Stock options are simply not as effective in limiting mobility as the power of Russian nobility to whip serfs into immobility once was. I've tried to make sense of what that means, but I'm lost in the balance-of-power, upper-lower/inside-outside, and guild references. If someone has a moment, could they please explain this paragraph in clearer terms? Perhaps as a basic narrative of what a guild-minded developer would do when she recognizes her value?
- moocow01 15y ago
  Just to let you know you're not alone, that one went completely over my head as well.
- dpritchett 15y ago
  Rather than move the mountain by unionizing and forcing big employers to pay up, skilled and connected developers can simply go around the mountain and disappear to the slightly better job down the street. As long as you are wired into a community of talented developers (and perhaps willing to relocate) you will have options. Spending years trying to "fix" a BigCo IT group from the bottom up is not likely to be the most rewarding use of a talented dev's time.
- Estragon 15y ago
  Drawing a superficial parallel to some other poorly understood or fictional organizing principle seems to be the author's main schtick. http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
hn_reader 15y ago
I'm on page two of the story but I am already starting to doubt the writer's basic understanding of technology and question whether continuing to read it is a waste of time: 1) "If your bakery doesn’t have an iPhone, it will soon be at the mercy of outfits like Yelp." - What does that even mean? 2) "A little known fact about Google, for instance, is that its investment in Python (one of the three languages the company uses for its work)" - Gonna go out on a limb here and state that Google uses more than three languages.
- vgr 15y ago
  http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2011/11/groupon-deal-burns-small-bakery-with-orders-for-102000-cupcakes/ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2011/11/groupon-deal-bu...
  - hn_reader 15y ago
    I remember hearing about this. Sounds like she should have placed a limit on the number of deals Groupon could sell. But what's the connection to his line about having an iPhone?
    - vgr 15y ago
      If you had your own iPhone app and knew how to market it properly, you wouldn't be at the mercy of Groupon's well-known strong-arm tactics in dealing with small businesses for instance. Or some other alternative tech-savvy way to market your business so you aren't killed by a few bad Yelp reviews or discounts from the social commerce/coupon startups that you don't know can hurt you till you try them. Many of the more prosperous small businesses are already starting to vie for control over their customer acquisition channels.
      - hn_reader 15y ago
        I also thought maybe he meant to write "iPhone app" and accidentally left out that word.
- 15y ago
1100110101 15y ago
And the fall of journalism. Forbes RIP. I learned UNIX. It still hasn't died off. Systems development is in my opinion the worthwhile development. How much attention does it get? The rest, whether for one user or many, is just "administration". The only things I see being "developed" are ways to try to bring the full utility of UNIX to the end-user who will never spend the time to learn it. Basic administration that is. Leave systems development to the people who read WR Stevens.
josscrowcroft 15y ago
I read all of this but had the uncanny feeling that it could have been said in about 10% of the space. Lots of waffle and fluff. Good points though ... I think? I can't hardly even remember what page 1 was about.
moocow01 15y ago
This guy is a bit too heavy handed in technology is everything and provides some not so convincing examples. I get his point but I'm pretty skeptical that the bakery's core business is now software - in fact I'd rather not taste the products of a bakery that has a core business of software. Yes software is becoming increasingly important to business but many times (ouside SV) software is a tool to better the core service but not the core service itself.
- kareemm 15y ago
  If you run a bakery and know how to write software (or convince other talented people to do so for you), do you think you'll be more or less competitive than a bakery owner that doesn't? Think about what software can do for a bakery: - use the web to sell more product - save gas money and time when delivering to wholesale customers - make production more efficient - use just-in-time ingredient ordering to keep spoilage and inventory costs down Perhaps you build those systems in-house and they (in addition to a killer baguette) are what makes you special. Or perhaps you productize your software and make millions selling it to bakeries (or spin off a company to do so). How will the baker who knows how to make good bread but doesn't know how to leverage software compete with you?
  - moocow01 15y ago
    The emphasis is on "core" - software is just a tool to enhance the core business as you're pointing out. If the bakery's core business sucks but they are great at software they will still suck as a bakery.
    - kareemm 15y ago
      I may have missed this, but I didn't get that the article talked about every company's core business now being software. I understood his argument to be that software developers are becoming increasingly valuable, and outsized returns will go to firms that understand this and learn how to treat software developers well to leverage what they're able to do to any industry.
pnathan 15y ago
There are several layers the author is arguing. First, he is telling developers that they are awesome. That's nice to hear, and of course will guarantee a friendly reception by developers. :-) Secondly, he is arguing that all businesses will be heavily software driven, and if they don't invest in IT, they will be winding up buying from a "cloud" provider. Thirdly, he is arguing that management needs to take a long position on hiring(non-pedantic note: a long position is where you expect a stock to go up, it is the "buy low sell high" approach), because it will pay off massively. Investing into software creators on the 50-year plan will provide heavy returns, because business are becoming software-ized, and it will pay off. I think in the scope of the next fifty years, the author is correct in that software will be one of the core strata of societies across the board (I don't see us there yet by a long shot - some places don't even have electricity still).
- mahyarm 15y ago
  They don't necessarily need electricity: http://www.salon.com/2011/10/13/the_tribesman_who_facebook_friended_me/ http://www.salon.com/2011/10/13/the_tribesman_who_facebook_f...
  - pnathan 15y ago
    That's pretty amazing! But, you know, I would argue that someone in that region needs electricity to hook up the facebook. :-)
msluyter 15y ago
As a developer ages, and finds it harder and harder to switch technologies, at some point, he or she is considered hooked for the rest of their natural lives to some technology — Java or C++ or the Facebook API say — that they can be expected to grow old with. Sigh. ::Closes eclipse. Googles "ruby tutorials"::
- httpitis 15y ago
  thanx for the laugh, made my day!
victorbstan 15y ago
For a Forbes article on developers, there sure are a lot of markup mistakes showing up throughout the text...
siculars 15y ago
"When the last veterans of the earliest still-in-use software layers start to die, we will be in historically unprecedented territory." So true, so true. We have already seen a spate of that this Fall, unfortunately.
brc 15y ago
I enjoyed this article, with the mindset of there are kernels of truth overlaid with layers of rhetoric and bandwagon hitching. I think though, that for the general audience it is intended for, it might wake a few people up to the fact that software is a core competency for just about every business and not a cost centre, and that competitors who can use software well are well positioned to outstrip those who can't. Further to that point is that, to get good software, you need good developers. And if you aren't actively trying to work out how to get the best developers, you're getting the leftovers. This fits neatly into the point I was making recently about government projects always being doomed because they end up with bad developers on projects with too many owners, and that governments everywhere should just buy off-the-shelf solutions and fit their way of working to them, rather than the other way around.
- djKianoosh 15y ago
  "This fits neatly into the point I was making recently about government projects always being doomed because they end up with bad developers on projects with too many owners, and that governments everywhere should just buy off-the-shelf solutions and fit their way of working to them, rather than the other way around." Initially I had a strong reaction against what you're saying here, but I see you chose your words carefully, saying gov projects "end up with bad developers on projects with too many owners". Sadly I have to agree, since I am in that world in the federal gov and see it first hand. But there are many highly talented developers here! They typically don't stay on projects long enough, so "end up with..." is exactly right. And that does tie in to your point that "to get good software, you need good developers", so it's a never-ending challenge trying to find and keep those 10xers engaged and happy with their work so they tend to produce that 'good software'...
  - httpitis 15y ago
    ...or "buy off-the-shelf solutions" as brc suggested?
    - djKianoosh 15y ago
      I don't think buying COTS or GOTS actually saves the government money in the long term. I dont have actual facts to back this claim of course, but it's just from many years of experience in this scene. Many times the requirements of an agency/office/mission are too specific for something off the shelf. The solution has to be either completely custom or a mix of COTS/GOTS. And when you have a mix you have integration. Software is a smaaaaalll part of the equation in government. It's the solution engineering (read: consultants/contractors) that cost the most. And I bet you'll always need/want highly skilled engineers for all sorts of roles. innovation is one, but keeping missing critical systems alive and operational is important too. what qualifies as 'mission critical' is another subject for another day, and can vary wildly depending on who you talk to... However, a lot of times, the requirements are truly simple, or simply met. And I think that's why you see a TON of Drupal being used in the gov these days. For many offices, that's all they ever needed. But even that's a smaaaaaal part of the pie. The government is huge! You can't imagine how many thousands of software projects are all going on at the same time right now...
cliftonk 15y ago
> Risk Management in Software Talent Investment Stopped reading one paragraph into that section.
lazyBilly 15y ago
Ok, I'm calling it-- when I find myself getting a bunch of hot air blown up my skirt by Forbes, we're officially in a tech bubble. That said, I found the point about being a capitalist or a commodity relevant to the startup scene in many important ways. There are a lot of people who want me to be very smart with code and very stupid with money.
tryitnow 15y ago
I think this "Developeronomics" article is a perfect example of what this other article was referring to: http://blogs.hbr.org/pallotta/2011/12/i-dont-understand-what-anyone.html http://blogs.hbr.org/pallotta/2011/12/i-dont-understand-what... Honestly, I think there are some interesting ideas there but I am not sure if those ideas are the author's or just a random collection of memes he picked up from the Internet.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
MarkPNeyer 15y ago
"very young startups set the bar in terms of providing realistic shots at big windfalls, no other type of business has any chance of really competing for top talent, with any mix of cash and stock it can conjure up" i wonder if he's taking the financial sector into account - people working in electronic trading make a good deal more than most start-up employees.
TheRevoltingX 15y ago
I've noticed in my industry that those who can't program, manage. Those who manage, tend to blog more because they have less to do in front of a computer. Kind of a useless and filled with false assumptions.
devilant 15y ago
The ideas in this article are eerily reminiscent of what people were saying in the late '90s/early '00s, particularly with respect to companies like Enron. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article making the opposite point to this one. http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm I suspect after the bubble pops we'll be reading 'the talent myth'-type articles in Forbes.
- brohee 15y ago
  The article you linked is so much better that the one we discuss, there's no comparison.
bambax 15y ago
> if you are a baker with a small business, you are effectively useless, not because bread isn’t important, but because surviving in the bread business is now a matter of having developers on your side who can help you win in a game that Yelp, Groupon and other software companies are running to their advantage I don't think this is true right now; I very much doubt it will ever be true. I live within walking distance of not less than five excellent boulangeries and have never used any sort of "social" tool or other technology to select the one I'm going to buy bread from. I try them all regularly, know what they do well or less well (one is better at croissants than the others) and basically go to the one that offers the best version of the product I'm looking for. Looking for "bargains" in bakery is asking for trouble; choosing your bread according to your "social network" (who's composed of people who do not live right next to you) sounds completely useless. It doesn't seem like bakers need to worry about Groupon, or Yelp. Is this just a poor example or am I missing something?
- calibraxis 15y ago
  I think it's a very insightful article regardless of whether some tech startups successfully become gatekeepers (internet landlords?) who dominate bakers, like Amazons of baked goods. I'm willing to accept a lot of incorrectness if the author is taking a few good concepts and pushing them to one logical extreme (which is essentially a process of exaggeration; and I expect a mental model to diverge from reality, like in any science).
  - bambax 15y ago
    I'm wary of the fact that it basically tells us what we want to hear: the only talent that matters are developers, companies who "get" developers will survive and those who don't, won't, no matter from which industry. That's a little too good to be true, and the bakery example stroke me as very ill-suited. I enjoyed the article, though, and I wish it were true that clueless incumbents would die rapidly and developers would get infinite leverage. What I think is true is that developers will get a little more leverage while clueless incumbents will take forever to disappear. (Edit: in the long run, everyone will be a developer. There will still be good and bad developers, but there won't be non-developers professionals, just like today there are not many people with a job who can't read or write.)
kandu 15y ago
How hard is to convert to developers adults with training in other areas, but with presumed cognitive skills suitable for programming? I am thinking of people of 35-50 years old, that would be intelligent enough (i.e., there would be just a percentage of this cohort that would be fit for becoming developers), but who, from various historical and personal reasons, work in industries where the prospects are less interesting than in programming. Are there any studies showing how the potential to learn programming decreases (or not) with age? I have looked on Google Scholar but I found nothing.
- blacksmythe 15y ago
  >> thinking of people of 35-50 years old ... You are in a tough situation if you are in your 40s and need to retrain, because there is not a long period of time to amortize the investment over. http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html (Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years)
berntb 15y ago
Reading stuff like this reminds me of 1999, when the bottom fell out of the job market a few years later: >>You need to find a way to invest in software developers. Sigh, the gold rush will start again...
veyron 15y ago
Key takeaway: "For practical purposes, [developers] are [products], since the vast majority of them haven’t found a way to use their own scarcity to their advantage"
zwieback 15y ago
After the first page I was waiting for the "but seriously" part of the article. Are we already too young to remeber WebVan? And the promised method of investing in developers never really materialized. Anyway, I don't think this article is going to help the author find the "technical cofounder" he's looking for. The fact that he even uses that term pretty much guarantees that he's not going to find a 10xer, even if that mythical creature existed. I for one can't wait for the social bubble to burst so programmers can flow back into the currently neglected branches of software development - we're getting old and lonely and could use some fresh talent.
localhost3000 15y ago
if this guy believes what he writes, why isn't he a developer? certainly these are skills that would be worth investing his time in. is it because he fancies himself a 'capitalist'? The cat fell out on this one when I reached his parenthetical, half-joking-but-not-really-wink-wink plea for a 'star' iOS developer to come out of the woodwork and build whatever ipad app is on his mind...nice of the forbes people to give him an audience for his recruitment pitch... content on the web has become so self-serving... i miss reading, and awkwardly trying to fold, the printed nytimes. yea, i said it.
- kls 15y ago
  For the same reason that there is a maximum of people that will go into math and science. It is looked at as one of the hard jobs, where smart technical people go to. A majority of the population does not fancy themselves as technically smart and hate logical puzzles. They view the market as something other people do. It is the same mindset of the founder "just looking for someone to build it". The though of learning it themselves, literally never crosses their mind because, they are not of that personality type. It's akin to saying people that go into finance where worth their weight in gold in the 90's, why didn't you go into finance, may of us did in a way, but most of us used a wealth manager, broker, mutual fund to do so. Developers are like that wealth manager, they do all the technical work that investors do not want to do. Some people take the time to learn the models and self direct their investments, but they are the minority. Most use a professional, though I doubt many investment professionals had to deal with the: "hey I have an idea I want you to build, I have no money, but I will cut you in for 10% propositions".
mncolinlee 15y ago
Clearly, there's one thing critically wrong with his hypothesis. A developer is never actually tied down to any one technology. We're human beings, not cogs, and our fundamental programming technologies are all derived from the same basic, mathematical algorithms. I started programming when I was six years old. BASIC on the TRS-80 Model 1. I aggressively studied programming because I thought computer games were cool, not because job prospects were hot. If a recruiter today tried to tell me that I had to stick to BASIC on TRS-80 because I started out there, I'd think he was nuts. Many recruiters actually believe this ludicrous idea and ARE nuts. It's not "re-inventing yourself" to learn a new programming language mid-career or at any time. Good hackers know it's simply learning another way to apply your skills to a new set of challenges.
IsItSafe 15y ago
He may not get every single detail right, but his overarching thesis is correct (or at least very useful), IMO. The author provides a good model for /thinking/ about these issues, even if some things could use a cleanup (including the formatting.)

282 points by ryanackley 15y ago

pw 15y ago

Anyone know how to toggle a single-page/print view for this?

keeptrying 15y ago
Please post it when you find it. thanks.
csarva 15y ago
Readability seems to handle it ok: http://www.readability.com/articles/c1xma652 http://www.readability.com/articles/c1xma652
driverdan 15y ago
ReadItLater works.
jwr 15y ago
Amazing — I came to the point where I will actually refuse to read an article if I can't get it into Instapaper easily. I guess I won't read that one, then…
- chris123 15y ago
  I skip those articles, too. Same for the "top xyz" lists/galleries. They should be one page, like http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/ http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/

jerf 15y ago

My "telling me what I want to hear" cognitive alarm bells are going off. On the other hand, this is simply the flip side of the frequently-heard argument around here that technology is driving people who can't cope out of the ability to hold a job at all, because they become unable to produce value in excess of what they cost. If that is true, then it follows that as the supply of people who can still be productive in the new economy drops, then they must also go up in price.

shasta 15y ago
I don't think that's right. If 50% of people became replaceable by robots, the other half doesn't become more valuable. Rather the value shifts to the robot owners. The article paints a simplistic picture, which is probably not correct even to first order, but it may be a useful viewpoint. The stratification should only increase, with the super devs obsoleting the ordinary code monkeys, but the time frame on that might be large.
- jerf 15y ago
  You hypothesize an either-or where it's a both-and. The robot owners need somebody to program the robots, too, or they're expensive-yet-worthless hunks of metal. And if that talent is scarce compared to demand, the price is going to go up.
  - shasta 15y ago
    Maybe I'm nitpicking, but I'd say that effect is due to an increase in demand for robot programmers, not due to a decrease in the supply of the productive workers.
- brc 15y ago
  The value shifts to the robot developers. They are the ones that capture more of the value originally pooled by the entire workforce. The robot owners get value in that they can lower their prices because of the replacement of labour with robots, and overall, society benefits because whatever the robots are making is now less costly (ie, takes less of your own hours working to purchase). The key to understanding all of this is productivity. Most people tend to think in terms of raw job numbers, rather than productivity numbers. Employing robots results in a more productive economy because the same (or greater) amount of output is achieved with less human input. This does release labour from that activity, but it also creates opportunities in other areas, as the savings people make on purchasing the robot-cheaper goods can now spend in other areas, which should create jobs in other areas. Of course rapidly advancing technology produces lumps of unemployed which take time to retrain and redeploy themselves elsewhere, and it sucks to be that person. But eventually they will find employment, assuming something else isn't working against that (like oversized debt accumulation, which works against new enterprise creation by causing a negative investment flow, but that's another story)

dpritchett 15y ago

The individualists turn into hard bargainers as they carefully probe their own market value and frequently re-negotiate relationships. They carefully invest in keeping their skill-base current and avoiding being shunted into the sunset end of the ecosystem for as long as possible. This sort of developer likes to hedge bets, stay invested in multiple projects and keep one foot in the open source world at all times. They position themselves for massive upsides when that is a possibility, and the ability to walk away from failures with their own reputations intact where there is real risk. Full agreement on this point. Once I started looking at my own career from this perspective I couldn't stop. Books like The Passionate Programmer and The Pragmatic Programmer as well as heaps of prose from pg, patio11, edw519, and tptacek guide my continuing quest for increased leverage.

gitah 15y ago
The article described old-guard programmers who mastered a technology and then couldn't find work when the technology died off. I have a hard time understanding this: programming skills are extremely transferable and learning the hot language/platform of the month isn't extremely difficult. Is it just inertia that prevents them from doing this?
- vgr 15y ago
  It isn't an old guard thing. It is a personality and strengths thing. I am not particularly old guard (I am 37), and while I am about average in the technologies I do know, I suck at learning new platforms/technologies. It's like pulling teeth. Those who are good at it just don't get how hard it can be for those are not quick learners in this sense. This is part of not knowing their own value -- claiming that learning new languages is "easy." It is. For them.
  - lazyBilly 15y ago
    I dunno, I guess I'm of the mindset that the waves are coming, and you're either on them or under them. These days, I get antsy if I get enough time in one stack that I really feel like I have it cooking. Which is how I've clawed my way up from the embedded programming basement all the way up to javascript now. (Aside: sweet jesus, how do you web guys put up with javascript? It's like java and ml's thalidomide baby.)

sumeetjain 15y ago

At the end of the article, the author explains how "once a good developer recognizes his/her own value, [she turns] to either an individualist-mercenary mindset or a collectivist guild-like mindset." He elaborates on the "guild-like mindset": > The other kind of developer turns to guild-like structures, which serve as centers of balance-of-power politics in the constant wars against the developer-capitalists. Except that instead of taking on the dynamics of class warfare along an upper-lower dimension, the conflict takes the form of exit warfare along an inside-outside dimension. Rather than form a union to negotiate with management, the talented developer will simply exit a situation he/she does not like, and use guild-like resources to move to a better situation. Stock options are simply not as effective in limiting mobility as the power of Russian nobility to whip serfs into immobility once was. I've tried to make sense of what that means, but I'm lost in the balance-of-power, upper-lower/inside-outside, and guild references. If someone has a moment, could they please explain this paragraph in clearer terms? Perhaps as a basic narrative of what a guild-minded developer would do when she recognizes her value?

moocow01 15y ago
Just to let you know you're not alone, that one went completely over my head as well.
dpritchett 15y ago
Rather than move the mountain by unionizing and forcing big employers to pay up, skilled and connected developers can simply go around the mountain and disappear to the slightly better job down the street. As long as you are wired into a community of talented developers (and perhaps willing to relocate) you will have options. Spending years trying to "fix" a BigCo IT group from the bottom up is not likely to be the most rewarding use of a talented dev's time.
Estragon 15y ago
Drawing a superficial parallel to some other poorly understood or fictional organizing principle seems to be the author's main schtick. http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

hn_reader 15y ago

I'm on page two of the story but I am already starting to doubt the writer's basic understanding of technology and question whether continuing to read it is a waste of time: 1) "If your bakery doesn’t have an iPhone, it will soon be at the mercy of outfits like Yelp." - What does that even mean? 2) "A little known fact about Google, for instance, is that its investment in Python (one of the three languages the company uses for its work)" - Gonna go out on a limb here and state that Google uses more than three languages.

vgr 15y ago
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2011/11/groupon-deal-burns-small-bakery-with-orders-for-102000-cupcakes/ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2011/11/groupon-deal-bu...
- hn_reader 15y ago
  I remember hearing about this. Sounds like she should have placed a limit on the number of deals Groupon could sell. But what's the connection to his line about having an iPhone?
  - vgr 15y ago
    If you had your own iPhone app and knew how to market it properly, you wouldn't be at the mercy of Groupon's well-known strong-arm tactics in dealing with small businesses for instance. Or some other alternative tech-savvy way to market your business so you aren't killed by a few bad Yelp reviews or discounts from the social commerce/coupon startups that you don't know can hurt you till you try them. Many of the more prosperous small businesses are already starting to vie for control over their customer acquisition channels.
    - hn_reader 15y ago
      I also thought maybe he meant to write "iPhone app" and accidentally left out that word.
15y ago

1100110101 15y ago

And the fall of journalism. Forbes RIP. I learned UNIX. It still hasn't died off. Systems development is in my opinion the worthwhile development. How much attention does it get? The rest, whether for one user or many, is just "administration". The only things I see being "developed" are ways to try to bring the full utility of UNIX to the end-user who will never spend the time to learn it. Basic administration that is. Leave systems development to the people who read WR Stevens.

josscrowcroft 15y ago

I read all of this but had the uncanny feeling that it could have been said in about 10% of the space. Lots of waffle and fluff. Good points though ... I think? I can't hardly even remember what page 1 was about.

moocow01 15y ago

This guy is a bit too heavy handed in technology is everything and provides some not so convincing examples. I get his point but I'm pretty skeptical that the bakery's core business is now software - in fact I'd rather not taste the products of a bakery that has a core business of software. Yes software is becoming increasingly important to business but many times (ouside SV) software is a tool to better the core service but not the core service itself.

kareemm 15y ago
If you run a bakery and know how to write software (or convince other talented people to do so for you), do you think you'll be more or less competitive than a bakery owner that doesn't? Think about what software can do for a bakery: - use the web to sell more product - save gas money and time when delivering to wholesale customers - make production more efficient - use just-in-time ingredient ordering to keep spoilage and inventory costs down Perhaps you build those systems in-house and they (in addition to a killer baguette) are what makes you special. Or perhaps you productize your software and make millions selling it to bakeries (or spin off a company to do so). How will the baker who knows how to make good bread but doesn't know how to leverage software compete with you?
- moocow01 15y ago
  The emphasis is on "core" - software is just a tool to enhance the core business as you're pointing out. If the bakery's core business sucks but they are great at software they will still suck as a bakery.
  - kareemm 15y ago
    I may have missed this, but I didn't get that the article talked about every company's core business now being software. I understood his argument to be that software developers are becoming increasingly valuable, and outsized returns will go to firms that understand this and learn how to treat software developers well to leverage what they're able to do to any industry.

pnathan 15y ago

There are several layers the author is arguing. First, he is telling developers that they are awesome. That's nice to hear, and of course will guarantee a friendly reception by developers. :-) Secondly, he is arguing that all businesses will be heavily software driven, and if they don't invest in IT, they will be winding up buying from a "cloud" provider. Thirdly, he is arguing that management needs to take a long position on hiring(non-pedantic note: a long position is where you expect a stock to go up, it is the "buy low sell high" approach), because it will pay off massively. Investing into software creators on the 50-year plan will provide heavy returns, because business are becoming software-ized, and it will pay off. I think in the scope of the next fifty years, the author is correct in that software will be one of the core strata of societies across the board (I don't see us there yet by a long shot - some places don't even have electricity still).

mahyarm 15y ago
They don't necessarily need electricity: http://www.salon.com/2011/10/13/the_tribesman_who_facebook_friended_me/ http://www.salon.com/2011/10/13/the_tribesman_who_facebook_f...
- pnathan 15y ago
  That's pretty amazing! But, you know, I would argue that someone in that region needs electricity to hook up the facebook. :-)

msluyter 15y ago

As a developer ages, and finds it harder and harder to switch technologies, at some point, he or she is considered hooked for the rest of their natural lives to some technology — Java or C++ or the Facebook API say — that they can be expected to grow old with. Sigh. ::Closes eclipse. Googles "ruby tutorials"::

httpitis 15y ago
thanx for the laugh, made my day!

victorbstan 15y ago

For a Forbes article on developers, there sure are a lot of markup mistakes showing up throughout the text...

siculars 15y ago

"When the last veterans of the earliest still-in-use software layers start to die, we will be in historically unprecedented territory." So true, so true. We have already seen a spate of that this Fall, unfortunately.

brc 15y ago

I enjoyed this article, with the mindset of there are kernels of truth overlaid with layers of rhetoric and bandwagon hitching. I think though, that for the general audience it is intended for, it might wake a few people up to the fact that software is a core competency for just about every business and not a cost centre, and that competitors who can use software well are well positioned to outstrip those who can't. Further to that point is that, to get good software, you need good developers. And if you aren't actively trying to work out how to get the best developers, you're getting the leftovers. This fits neatly into the point I was making recently about government projects always being doomed because they end up with bad developers on projects with too many owners, and that governments everywhere should just buy off-the-shelf solutions and fit their way of working to them, rather than the other way around.

djKianoosh 15y ago
"This fits neatly into the point I was making recently about government projects always being doomed because they end up with bad developers on projects with too many owners, and that governments everywhere should just buy off-the-shelf solutions and fit their way of working to them, rather than the other way around." Initially I had a strong reaction against what you're saying here, but I see you chose your words carefully, saying gov projects "end up with bad developers on projects with too many owners". Sadly I have to agree, since I am in that world in the federal gov and see it first hand. But there are many highly talented developers here! They typically don't stay on projects long enough, so "end up with..." is exactly right. And that does tie in to your point that "to get good software, you need good developers", so it's a never-ending challenge trying to find and keep those 10xers engaged and happy with their work so they tend to produce that 'good software'...
- httpitis 15y ago
  ...or "buy off-the-shelf solutions" as brc suggested?
  - djKianoosh 15y ago
    I don't think buying COTS or GOTS actually saves the government money in the long term. I dont have actual facts to back this claim of course, but it's just from many years of experience in this scene. Many times the requirements of an agency/office/mission are too specific for something off the shelf. The solution has to be either completely custom or a mix of COTS/GOTS. And when you have a mix you have integration. Software is a smaaaaalll part of the equation in government. It's the solution engineering (read: consultants/contractors) that cost the most. And I bet you'll always need/want highly skilled engineers for all sorts of roles. innovation is one, but keeping missing critical systems alive and operational is important too. what qualifies as 'mission critical' is another subject for another day, and can vary wildly depending on who you talk to... However, a lot of times, the requirements are truly simple, or simply met. And I think that's why you see a TON of Drupal being used in the gov these days. For many offices, that's all they ever needed. But even that's a smaaaaaal part of the pie. The government is huge! You can't imagine how many thousands of software projects are all going on at the same time right now...

cliftonk 15y ago

> Risk Management in Software Talent Investment Stopped reading one paragraph into that section.

lazyBilly 15y ago

Ok, I'm calling it-- when I find myself getting a bunch of hot air blown up my skirt by Forbes, we're officially in a tech bubble. That said, I found the point about being a capitalist or a commodity relevant to the startup scene in many important ways. There are a lot of people who want me to be very smart with code and very stupid with money.

tryitnow 15y ago

I think this "Developeronomics" article is a perfect example of what this other article was referring to: http://blogs.hbr.org/pallotta/2011/12/i-dont-understand-what-anyone.html http://blogs.hbr.org/pallotta/2011/12/i-dont-understand-what... Honestly, I think there are some interesting ideas there but I am not sure if those ideas are the author's or just a random collection of memes he picked up from the Internet.

deleted 15y ago

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MarkPNeyer 15y ago

"very young startups set the bar in terms of providing realistic shots at big windfalls, no other type of business has any chance of really competing for top talent, with any mix of cash and stock it can conjure up" i wonder if he's taking the financial sector into account - people working in electronic trading make a good deal more than most start-up employees.

TheRevoltingX 15y ago

I've noticed in my industry that those who can't program, manage. Those who manage, tend to blog more because they have less to do in front of a computer. Kind of a useless and filled with false assumptions.

devilant 15y ago

The ideas in this article are eerily reminiscent of what people were saying in the late '90s/early '00s, particularly with respect to companies like Enron. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article making the opposite point to this one. http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm I suspect after the bubble pops we'll be reading 'the talent myth'-type articles in Forbes.

brohee 15y ago
The article you linked is so much better that the one we discuss, there's no comparison.

bambax 15y ago

> if you are a baker with a small business, you are effectively useless, not because bread isn’t important, but because surviving in the bread business is now a matter of having developers on your side who can help you win in a game that Yelp, Groupon and other software companies are running to their advantage I don't think this is true right now; I very much doubt it will ever be true. I live within walking distance of not less than five excellent boulangeries and have never used any sort of "social" tool or other technology to select the one I'm going to buy bread from. I try them all regularly, know what they do well or less well (one is better at croissants than the others) and basically go to the one that offers the best version of the product I'm looking for. Looking for "bargains" in bakery is asking for trouble; choosing your bread according to your "social network" (who's composed of people who do not live right next to you) sounds completely useless. It doesn't seem like bakers need to worry about Groupon, or Yelp. Is this just a poor example or am I missing something?

calibraxis 15y ago
I think it's a very insightful article regardless of whether some tech startups successfully become gatekeepers (internet landlords?) who dominate bakers, like Amazons of baked goods. I'm willing to accept a lot of incorrectness if the author is taking a few good concepts and pushing them to one logical extreme (which is essentially a process of exaggeration; and I expect a mental model to diverge from reality, like in any science).
- bambax 15y ago
  I'm wary of the fact that it basically tells us what we want to hear: the only talent that matters are developers, companies who "get" developers will survive and those who don't, won't, no matter from which industry. That's a little too good to be true, and the bakery example stroke me as very ill-suited. I enjoyed the article, though, and I wish it were true that clueless incumbents would die rapidly and developers would get infinite leverage. What I think is true is that developers will get a little more leverage while clueless incumbents will take forever to disappear. (Edit: in the long run, everyone will be a developer. There will still be good and bad developers, but there won't be non-developers professionals, just like today there are not many people with a job who can't read or write.)

kandu 15y ago

How hard is to convert to developers adults with training in other areas, but with presumed cognitive skills suitable for programming? I am thinking of people of 35-50 years old, that would be intelligent enough (i.e., there would be just a percentage of this cohort that would be fit for becoming developers), but who, from various historical and personal reasons, work in industries where the prospects are less interesting than in programming. Are there any studies showing how the potential to learn programming decreases (or not) with age? I have looked on Google Scholar but I found nothing.

blacksmythe 15y ago
>> thinking of people of 35-50 years old ... You are in a tough situation if you are in your 40s and need to retrain, because there is not a long period of time to amortize the investment over. http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html (Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years)

berntb 15y ago

Reading stuff like this reminds me of 1999, when the bottom fell out of the job market a few years later: >>You need to find a way to invest in software developers. Sigh, the gold rush will start again...

veyron 15y ago

Key takeaway: "For practical purposes, [developers] are [products], since the vast majority of them haven’t found a way to use their own scarcity to their advantage"

zwieback 15y ago

After the first page I was waiting for the "but seriously" part of the article. Are we already too young to remeber WebVan? And the promised method of investing in developers never really materialized. Anyway, I don't think this article is going to help the author find the "technical cofounder" he's looking for. The fact that he even uses that term pretty much guarantees that he's not going to find a 10xer, even if that mythical creature existed. I for one can't wait for the social bubble to burst so programmers can flow back into the currently neglected branches of software development - we're getting old and lonely and could use some fresh talent.

localhost3000 15y ago

if this guy believes what he writes, why isn't he a developer? certainly these are skills that would be worth investing his time in. is it because he fancies himself a 'capitalist'? The cat fell out on this one when I reached his parenthetical, half-joking-but-not-really-wink-wink plea for a 'star' iOS developer to come out of the woodwork and build whatever ipad app is on his mind...nice of the forbes people to give him an audience for his recruitment pitch... content on the web has become so self-serving... i miss reading, and awkwardly trying to fold, the printed nytimes. yea, i said it.

kls 15y ago
For the same reason that there is a maximum of people that will go into math and science. It is looked at as one of the hard jobs, where smart technical people go to. A majority of the population does not fancy themselves as technically smart and hate logical puzzles. They view the market as something other people do. It is the same mindset of the founder "just looking for someone to build it". The though of learning it themselves, literally never crosses their mind because, they are not of that personality type. It's akin to saying people that go into finance where worth their weight in gold in the 90's, why didn't you go into finance, may of us did in a way, but most of us used a wealth manager, broker, mutual fund to do so. Developers are like that wealth manager, they do all the technical work that investors do not want to do. Some people take the time to learn the models and self direct their investments, but they are the minority. Most use a professional, though I doubt many investment professionals had to deal with the: "hey I have an idea I want you to build, I have no money, but I will cut you in for 10% propositions".

mncolinlee 15y ago

Clearly, there's one thing critically wrong with his hypothesis. A developer is never actually tied down to any one technology. We're human beings, not cogs, and our fundamental programming technologies are all derived from the same basic, mathematical algorithms. I started programming when I was six years old. BASIC on the TRS-80 Model 1. I aggressively studied programming because I thought computer games were cool, not because job prospects were hot. If a recruiter today tried to tell me that I had to stick to BASIC on TRS-80 because I started out there, I'd think he was nuts. Many recruiters actually believe this ludicrous idea and ARE nuts. It's not "re-inventing yourself" to learn a new programming language mid-career or at any time. Good hackers know it's simply learning another way to apply your skills to a new set of challenges.

IsItSafe 15y ago

He may not get every single detail right, but his overarching thesis is correct (or at least very useful), IMO. The author provides a good model for /thinking/ about these issues, even if some things could use a cleanup (including the formatting.)