11–20 of 105 posts
Uh, the reasons government IT projects are typically huge wasteful boondoggles are not because programmer salaries are too high or programmer talent is mediocre.
Why doesn't the pay reflect the supply and demand? I consider myself a decent developer with 9 years of industry experience in several domains and my salary is only $88k. It sounds like based on the demand, I should be pulling in a lot more.
Serious applications seem so complex with their millions of lines of code that people are simply scared off.
I know that the industry is now trying to entice youth and professionals to begin learning code with things like http://code.org, but they need to focus more on the rewards (i.e. like how much money you can make, and job stability even during economic crises).
Learning to code is hard, and you need to commit your brain to 3 years of serious edumacation, and then 5 years of industry experience if you want it to succeed.
That's a tough bill for anyone to swallow.
"But that doesn’t explain why people in the Philippines or China aren’t training themselves en masse to be able to soak up the $30-100/hour jobs that would be readily available to them" Rentacoder is readily available, its just that word on the street was most jobs paid about $5/hr. Amazon's Mechanical Turk has some extremely fuzzy stats and not much more than anecdotes but earning around $7/hr has been reported. Hig…
You need a small amount of specific knowledge to start working (at a specific place), and leaving the job takes almost no knowledge away.
Software development is a very slow start, depending on the project.
Just try and see how long until a developer has the development environment. Yes, it should be a 'turn key' solution but that's often not the case.
Why isn't there a glut of baseball players who hit .408 in the major leagues? Because it's a rare person who can hit a ball thrown at nearly 100 MPH 40% of the time. Software engineers are common but people who deliver quality product after product is a rare bird. Programming at a high level is not as easy as this author seems to think.
Accuracy is a better indicator of success for a baseball pitcher than velocity.
Why isn't there a glut of baseball players who hit .408 in the major leagues? Because it's a rare person who can hit a ball thrown at nearly 100 MPH 40% of the time. Software engineers are common but people who deliver quality product after product is a rare bird. Programming at a high level is not as easy as this author seems to think.
So the pool of great programmers is generally limited to those who love the job _so much_ that they’re willing to forgo income to do it. Someone with a “125 IQ” and strong math abilities could get a job on Wall Street, or as an actuary, etc and make more money for less frustration.
At Amazon, they target 75th percentile comp – but I really doubt they also target hiring 75th percentile developers on average. So they’re basically trying to hire 90th percentile employees for 75th percentile comp. I’d argue the entire industry does that in comparison to non-engineering industries.
The next time a CEO complains they can’t hire enough engineers, ask them how much over market they’re offering.
The article starts with the primary assumption that programming is a commodity skill, then is astounded when the world doesn't back up his theory. Not exactly going to learn a lot like that.
Why programming isn't a commodity skill? Or will become such commodity soon? Programming is like a house builder. Yes there are better and more experienced builders, but most of them can build a house top to bottom with no problem.
The article starts with the primary assumption that programming is a commodity skill, then is astounded when the world doesn't back up his theory. Not exactly going to learn a lot like that.
Why programming isn't a commodity skill? Or will become such commodity soon? Programming is like a house builder. Yes there are better and more experienced builders, but most of them can build a house top to bottom with no problem.
The article starts with the primary assumption that programming is a commodity skill, then is astounded when the world doesn't back up his theory. Not exactly going to learn a lot like that.
Why programming isn't a commodity skill? Or will become such commodity soon? Programming is like a house builder. Yes there are better and more experienced builders, but most of them can build a house top to bottom with no problem.
For certain values of "problem" as defined by the builder? Sure.
For what a buyer defines as a "problem"? Highly debatable.
Even in house construction, an activity that has been performed for literally THOUSANDS OF YEARS, there is no commoditization. If nothing else accounts for this, the bewildering array of local building codes assures that commodity construction as presented by a builder (like a national prefab builder) is really a business-level API that presents a uniform interface to buyers that hides a team that handles all the local idiosyncrasies underneath.