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Re: Software Development Has Stalled
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Posted: Feb 4, 2010 8:33 AM
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> I don't know if every organization will need developers.
> But maybe that makes sense for medium to large
> e organizations. A single talented developer can build
> systems that do the work of hundreds if not many thousands
> of traditional employees. When people talk about the high
> cost of application development, they must be using some
> sort of 'new' math.
The other thing I've seen that is impossible to quantify because you don't see it until it happens that these systems can allow people to do work that they otherwise would not have been able to do. I don't think there is a good way to account for that. So let's say your talented developer builds a system that can do the work of a couple hundred employees.
One obvious side effect of this is that those couple hundred employees simply don't have jobs anymore. The other side effect I've seen, which is more interesting in a lot of ways, is that those folks end up finding ways to do more or better work that adds a lot more value.
In my experience most of these systems that end up doing the work of many people don't just suddenly appear on a given date and immediately make people obsolete. They evolve over time. I think that is what accounts for the perception of the high cost of development in most cases. If you could say "I'm going to start on Feb 10, 2010, finish on June 22, 2011 and have a system that will do the work of 325 employees" it would be very, very simple to figure out if that system should be built based on cost. You take the salaries and benefits of the people that will be replaced, the cost of the effort to build the system and an estimate of maintenance and figure out what side of the fence the value of the system lives on. That just doesn't seem to happen in real life, though.
What happens is that you say it will be done on June 22, 2011 and it isn't really done until Mid November. So the people are still working. And the system doesn't work 100% correctly so you can't just fire everybody since you need to produce things correctly for your clients. And it's unknown how long it will take to work all the bugs out of the system. Over time, as issues are worked out, people move onto other things as the system does the more rote parts of all these people's jobs. Maybe some people are entirely replaceable, but not all of them as initially projected, so instead of getting rid of 325 employees maybe only 100 or so end up having to look for new jobs. I don't think there's a way to account for the value of what the existing employees are doing very easily, or to account for the time savings, so what you have is a system that was delivered many months late, that probably sent you quite a bit over budget and it only 'saved' you about 1/3 of what you originally projected. That's pretty much a failure by every measurable objective that you had at the outset. From this viewpoint you are telling people that a system that cost much more than you said and saved them much less than projected is a success?
I don't think that scenario is very uncommon.
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