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Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

blog.cerebralab.com

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Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#51

Post by eloisant »

rubber_duck wrote: post #21

>3. Most "good" programmers move to the high-income countries Your example of Germany and Switzerland in this case is less illustrative than say India and US - the poorest places automatically lose the best talent because the standard of living is not comparable even if you were earning the same remotely and had 1/10 living expenses. And then you factor in the quality of education available, projects available, etc.…

There is also visa issues, not wanting to be away from family, liking the life/culture of your home country...

Surely it's easy from Germany to Switzerland or Canada to the US, when you're moving to a different continent it's a whole different experience.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#52

Post by offbrandsneaks »

This seems to be a fully general argument, in some sense - I know programming jobs are easier to do remotely, but surely that is also true of some accounting work and other white collar jobs. Why hasn't a larger chunk of the white collar economy transitioned? I think answering that question will answer the question for programming specifically.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#53

Post by danaris »

siscia wrote: post #24
smaddox wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We do have problem coordinate between teams that share the same hall and the same boss So perhaps proximity is not the issue?

The reality I see, is that all of us are overworked / with a lot of responsibilities. So it is easy to miss important emails or details. As long as we are close to each other, very important things don't get lost.

That doesn't sound like a problem that remote work will either solve or cause. That sounds like a problem with staffing and management—hardly an uncommon one—that needs to be solved by either reducing the team's responsibilities, or increasing staffing.

(Personally, I'm pretty damn sick of management, of any level, insisting that these are the responsibilities, these are the tasks, if you can't get them done it's your fault, even in the face of their team telling them, repeatedly, that they're overworked. That's abusive management, period. Hire more damn people.)

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#54

Post by Frost1x »

crote wrote: post #13

It seems to be missing a very big factor: culture. If your goal is to implement some code for, say, healthcare, it is a lot easier to explain the business process to someone who is already familiar with how stuff is done on a higher level. Whenever you hire someone from a different culture / country, you need to start from the basics by explaining the very core of your society. An American programmer might not be too…

This has been my experience over my career. Developers tend to forget they're ultimately developing tools for humans. Very few care about the underlying technology, complexity, how clean your code is... they just want something they can use to reach a goal reliably, with manageable complexity, and at reasonable cost.

Once you really understand that, you'll understand why it's difficult for those in other cultures, using other primary languages, and sometimes even remote employees to develop effective software without difficulty.

Much of software development assumes that specifications are perfectly understood, translated, and captured. This is rarely if ever the case. Developers are very frequently inferring and making microdecisions within the context of what they're developing using their personal knowledge. When they don't do this, you often get products that just don't solve the target problem.

One factor businesses really shot themselves in the foot when they butchered agile into a micromanagement time pressuring system to squeeze work out is that it made localized workers even more of a necessity because it has to be done (and interpreted) fairly quickly. This, IMHO, puts remote workers, especially those in other cultures, at a huge disadvantage as well as the systems/tools they're developing.

I don't doubt for a second talent can be distributed world wide but I do doubt that there's enough talent that can understand the context of the systems they're building to make project managers, businesses, clients, etc. happy.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#55

Post by worldsayshi »

My take:

1. Software industry is partially an oligarchy. A few companies make a huge amount of money. A large amount of companies make less but still a sizeable amount of money.

2. The amount of developers needed in the really wealthy companies is limited. The wealthy companies don't need to compete that much for talent but they also don't need to keep down the salaries that much.

3. There is a cost associated with diversifying to different countries. If you don't need to, why would you?

The market overall has about medium buying power. A small part of the market has huge buying power. The wealthy companies end up in a few places and don't have a limited interest in diversifying geographically.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#56

Post by [deleted] »

VMisTheWay wrote: post #9
Yanu-3452 wrote: post #4

This is an odd analysis, because as it highlights, salaries are strongly correlated with wealth of the country. So the question really becomes, not why are salaries different, but "why is programming difficult to offshore". If programming was easy to import and export then either salaries would even out or, more likely, would be relocated to cheaper countries like many kinds of manufacturing. But software is difficul…

I found it quite difficult to outsource Engineering work to Engineers in another country. It might be a cultural thing, but issues I've ran into- Slow/low prioritization, no movement unless you follow up often, lack of experience. Don't get me wrong, I can be lazy too. But when things are outsourced it's really hard to keep positive relations and get stuff done on time with high quality.

[deleted]

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#57

Post by jesstaa »

crote wrote: post #13

It seems to be missing a very big factor: culture. If your goal is to implement some code for, say, healthcare, it is a lot easier to explain the business process to someone who is already familiar with how stuff is done on a higher level. Whenever you hire someone from a different culture / country, you need to start from the basics by explaining the very core of your society. An American programmer might not be too…

This is definitely it.

The best markets for selling software are the wealthy countries with their cultures. You need people in those countries that are part of those cultures to develop that software. So your employment market is limited by people within that culture that have that skill, which is why there is still a software development skills shortage.

For purely technical things like kernel, database, network or driver development the job market is much smaller but it's also much easier to move those jobs to lower income countries, which is very common.

But most software development jobs are at the application level where having a matching language and culture with your users is essential.

Something as trivial as a signup form that asks for firstname and lastname and then refers to the user by their firstname later in the application is something you wouldn't even need to spec out for an English speaking programmer. They would just implement it like that by default because that's the culture.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#58

Post by akmarinov »

matz1 wrote: post #46
crote wrote: post #13

It seems to be missing a very big factor: culture. If your goal is to implement some code for, say, healthcare, it is a lot easier to explain the business process to someone who is already familiar with how stuff is done on a higher level. Whenever you hire someone from a different culture / country, you need to start from the basics by explaining the very core of your society. An American programmer might not be too…

This remind me of the recent Microsoft AI that can write code demo. You give the AI instruction and explanation in English, preferably as clear and as detailed as possible and you get back code. Essentially its very similar workflow when working with offshore developer, in the future you could in theory replace the offshore dev with AI, except with much less latency.

Well you can replace all developers by that logic not just offshore ones.

Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?

#59

Post by vsareto »

ryanianian wrote: post #41
gbasin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out, the hard part of software is figuring out what to build. The rest is cheap in comparison, whether done in SF or Bangalore.

Yes. And how to build it. I worked with a brilliant but rather lazy contractor once. His code was unmaintainable despite him being obviously competent. His rationale was very explicitly that maintainable code doesn't make for good job-security. You don't want to be held hostage by your own code.

These guys can be goofballs and only appear competent on the surface. Referrals can be job security as well, and you won't get referrals if you intentionally write bad code.

In other cases, it's skilled people that just don't want to apply 100% effort and are just coasting, maybe for external reasons (some folks can write decent code without 100% effort in the moment due to practice beforehand).

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