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by Darrell Norton.
Original Post: How to fix the software development industry
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Jay has some musings on Bob Reselman's Coding Slave book. If you've read Coding Slave (now a free download), you'll realize Bob was proposing one method of fixing the current state of software development by proposing a programmers guild. Jay offers two suggestions, work-life balance and religion/spirituality. And Steve McConnell thinks it should be industry certification.
In order to propose a solution, we have to look at the problem in more depth. A programmers guild wouldn't work due to a prisoners' dilemma problem. If everyone cooperates, we can do great things. But the individual motivations ALWAYS reward not cooperating. Someone will say, if I don't work for the programmers guild, I can get a little less money for a lot less work because I don't have to follow those procedures and don't have to pay dues. And some company somewhere will take a defector up on that offer. Work-life balance generally works only for employees with family. Younger employees are generally motivated by money, and dedicated developers are motivated by recognition, with all good software developers being motivated by the technical challenge. And unlike medicine, where the backers of certification are usually the state board, the IEEE certification is backed by training companies (Can you say conflict of interest? I knew you could.).
No, the foundational problem is money. Everyone has heard the "great programmers are 10 times more productive" thing. And everyone that quotes this immediately follows it up with "and since you only have to pay them twice as much, great programmers are a steal!" Even though great programmers are motivated by more than money, who reading this wouldn't mind a little extra cash in their paycheck? Right.
In addition to paying great programmers more, we need to pay crappy, or maybe "less sophisticated", programmers much less. The reason that companies only want to pay 10x productive programmers 2x as much is because of all the "dead wood" that they have to pay too much for. Haven't you ever had a negative producer on your team? Just remember that the company was paying them almost as much as they were paying you, and all they were doing was slowing you down. It upsets companies just as much as it bothers you.
Check out the following figure of value and salary. The red area is wasted money. This is the salary and benefits companies pay for people that are not contributing as much value as they are extracting from the system. (As an aside, nature has a term for life forms that do not give back to the host....) The purple area is the unvalued contribution, also known as the CEO's bonus zone. The bigger the purple area, the bigger the CEO's bonus.
What the industry needs to do is to bring the two lines more into alignment. For example, in the following image the salary line is more closely matched to the contributed value line. This means great programmers get paid a lot more. This also means that bad programmers get paid a lot less. This would force out of the market those programmers that expect to be paid a lot but that contribute very little.
Some might argue that the lines should match exactly. This will never happen since nobody, programmers nor businesses, have perfect information about the value line. Also, there will still be some entrants into the market that will be paid slightly more than they are worth, because they will be expected to move up the curve quickly. This is analogous to sports rookies getting paid obscene amounts of money when they won't take their team to the Super Bowl for 4 more years.
So that's my proposal for improving the software development industry. How exactly we go about doing that is another matter.
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