Companies worry more about access to software developers than capital

I never claimed that increasing developer productivity is a fool's errand.

Quite the contrary: earlier in my career, my supervisor improved my productivity by carefully observing my development strategies and finding areas where I could work more efficiently.

He managed to do that because he was a very senior engineer (over 20 years of experience at the time) and knew exactly what was going on in my development and the way I approached it back then.

The guy was incredibly expensive, but thankfully I worked in a place where paying engineers like him exceedingly well was the norm, so he and others stuck around.

This isn't the norm in the industry and as you yourself observed, the typical way to "increase productivity" is get some fresh-faced MBA to apply some banal "productivity improving" tips from the article he read on the latest "CIO Today", which typically boil down to "apply pressure" and "make them work longer hours".

It often just makes work more stressful and makes the engineers feel worse, but it's the easiest and cheapest way to try to "increase productivity", so that's what's being used.

Reality is that clueless managers who could never cut it as devs themselves are rampant in the industry. Remember the Pointy-Haired Boss? That guy wasn't some outlandish joke - he and his ilk used to rule this industry!

In fact they still do in many places. Somehow engineers got cowed into accepting that their direct supervisor is someone who never did what they do, probably never could, and doesn't really understand it.

I know of no other profession like this.

So yeah, improving engineer productivity is possible. But no, most engineering managers reading this article would not do what it takes to establish an engineering culture, pay for Tribe Elders to stick around, and do all the other complex and subtle and expensive things that actually improve productivity.

In fact, why pay the Tribe Elder at all when we can just fire him and hire 3 fresh-faced graduates instead?!

They'd tell their PHBs to whip engineers harder and get them to stay in the office longer, or worse: introduce bogus metrics like "LoC written" as a performance measure (I've seen this happen THIS IS NOT A JOKE).

Severely underestimated.

I for instance sometimes work from a shared space where most colleagues are not devs. It isn't apparent to them why a quiet environment with little to no interruption is necessary for my kind of work as a dev. Luckily, I can work from home so unless I have a client meeting or presentation, I don't bother going in.

Sure, and some of them count as "compensation" in the broad sense. For example, if the company is willing to give me more paid time off, then that's equivalent to higher pay.

Some of the other factors you mentioned (such as whether it's "green-field") aren't compensation and can't be adjusted to attract candidates.

Pay is relatively easy to adjust, so it's an easy and fairly general answer to the complex problem of recruiting and retaining engineers.

> For most developers earning over $100K as it is, an extra 10% or even 20% isn't going to change where they eat, what car they drive, where they live, their house, their clothes, or even necessarily what kind of vacation(s) they go on every year.

I've seen developers change their choice of an offer based on $15-20k. It may not seem like a lot to you, but it's important for many people, and I totally respect that.

My comment more broadly was not just about pay, but about the attitude that "developer shortage" is going to be solved by sticks (pressuring developers to be more productive, aggressive outsourcing), rather than carrots (better pay, benefits, work environment, etc.)

The industry's fondness of trying to beat down engineer comp with sticks for decades (how many times was the outsourcing boogeyman paraded?) is the reason for the current predicament.

People looked at all the "outsource all the things!!1" articles on "CIO Today" and decided programming ain't for them 10 years ago. That's why we lack senior engineers now.

Solution for the problem? According to the article, it's more sticks!

Who writes these things?!

It's simply not an issue, and in reality if you're a "bad programmer" you'd have trouble getting hired, let alone staying anywhere for more than a couple of months.

This is the US. You can fire them for no reason. The only reason to do it for "vague reasons" instead is to try and avoid the unemployment insurance hit.

Check out compensation for medical doctors, dentists, nurses, attorneys, sales people, and an endless list of others in the US compared to Russia, China, and Central Europe.

Hint: the median pay for any of these is often 5x or more here.

Compare cost of living too, while you're at it.

Practically any profession in the US makes more money than anywhere else. Certainly in big cities like SF and NYC.

> Said otherwise, developers in China and Russia and Central Europe - often who speak very good English - are now increasingly competing with U.S. developers as the world embraces more remote work.

There were articles about outsourcing 10 years ago too. In fact, the perceived rush to "outsource all the things!" that many companies embraced (to their detriment) is why a lot of good people saw software engineering as a hopeless field consigning them to compete with foreigners for pennies.

That's why we have the current shortage of senior engineers: sensible folks didn't want to have to race to the bottom on comp against foreigners living in locations where $50k buys you a palace.

> I suspect that before salaries increase more in the U.S., we'll see it first increase in these developer-rich emerging markets.

They already are. Check out what's going on in Bangalore right now.

The tech industry has been scaring developers into submission by waving the outsourcing stick for decades. Then they discovered good talent is rare everywhere. Now good engineers in Bangalore are making salaries that are in the same ballpark as American salaries.

Let pay rise there too, I say. Good for them.

In those places, wages often rose to compensate for commensurate rises in cost of living.

Where did wages rise the most? SF Bay. How much did they rise? 30-50%. How much did cost of living, especially rent, rise during that time? Roughly the same.

Can developers in SF Bay afford to buy a house?

No.

Yet somehow they are content with these modest raises...

> Paying more just ensures that the scarce and valuable resource is allocated to the companies that can make the most profits from it.

Even if that's the only advantage, speaking as engineers, that is a huge advantage. It means engineers are paid more. Even if all else remains equal, that's a good outcome for engineers.

> But it doesn't make more engineers.

This was already covered below.

Better pay convinces more and better people to enter the field, encourages existing senior developers (the exact sort that are most needed) to stick around and keep doing meaningful work, and reduces turnover, so years of engineering knowledge and training aren't wasted because the only way to get a decent raise is to job hop.

These are just 3 random examples of how better pay will "make more engineers".

I still don't get how getting paid more is bad for engineers or the field as a whole. In every other case, rise in demand/supply ratio will increase price. Why shouldn't it happen for engineers?

Even if that was the only effect, it would be good. But obviously, there are many more important positive effects to raising pay. In fact, a big reason for the current "shortage" is that pay was kept artificially low for a long time, now you suggest we keep doing that... why?

Which is exactly what happens during an oil crisis... :)

Oil prices rise, and people who don't need oil so much stop purchasing it.

> The SW development crisis is that companies have to pay more for high-octane developers and they don't want to, or can not afford to pay ludicrous prices.

Right, with one small difference:

In the US, employers get to whine to the government about this eternal "crisis", then the government issues hundreds of thousands more work visas (in addition to the "minimal quota" of hundreds of thousands that is already issued every year like clockworks), and then the employers are happy: they get to fire older, well-paid employees, and hire fresh H1B holders who are tethered to their jobs and can be deported for poor performance, much like slaves.

They keep wages down this way, until next year, when they whine some more about how Americans don't want to become engineers. One wonders why.

There's a whole bunch of smart people right now who won't go into tech because they can make more elsewhere.

Another example is senior engineers who retire because their investment portfolio is large enough, and they don't feel like working hard for another year just to make another $150k. If it was $400k, they might stay. These are the engineers who are the most scarce and at the greatest demand right now.

Another example is turnover. Engineers currently have to job hop every couple of years to get a decent raise. That leads to more waste of engineer time and effort than any single management improvement that can possibly be implemented.

These are just 3 examples off the top of my head.

In every other field, it is obvious that more pay == more and better candidates. Yet somehow engineers are the single exception?

Against any sensible market theory?

Maybe not suddenly.

Give it four years.

A common misconception. Check out other comments in this thread. Folks in many other professions, such as nursing, can make about the same as "senior engineers".

> At some point businesses just can't afford to pay any more

I heard the same claim back when $150k was a top salary in SF. Then companies needed to pay more, and somehow they managed to do so.

Check out a tech company's balance sheet. The margins are typically more than enough to cover some raises.

Until the specialist quits, and then your logic breaks completely.

Arguably, you're making him quit, since if you ever worked as a developer, you'd know there's only so many hours you can put in. Beyond that, you are burning out and generating more mistakes than valuable code.

My anecdotal observation is that both pay and work-life balance has been improving at FAANGs. I remember reading 10 years ago about how developers feel pressured to overwork in companies like Google. This doesn't seem to be the case anymore with my friends working for FAANGs.

Unless we're talking about executive-level pay (i.e. high seven figures), paying someone a few more thousands per year doesn't justify a destructive work-life balance. In fact, it's a self-defeating strategy that hasn't worked and seems to be largely abandoned by most savvy employers.

Much of agism is actuulay moeny related too.

While allot comes from the belief that "young people are just smarter" (as opposed to whites or men as was the "common sense" in the past).

Much of the discrimination is because it is assumed that after a few years, technologists actually know how much they're worth while the fresh college graduate etc is awestruck by a wage that is barely over bay-area poverty line: There's an assumption you can't get a bargain hiring the over 35 set.

Because probably only larger companies (very difficult for startups to innovate here!) can actually afford individual offices, and it's not exactly trivial to re-arrange, I think it just takes a long time for the conventional wisdom to change.

Do they really want the work done, or do they want to actively encourage inter-office politicking? Not everyone wants to advance, and even in places I've worked where I've wanted to advance, it was made pretty clear that nothing was going to be happening on my time schedule (too many other people who'd "paid their dues" ahead of me already). So... wow - I was interested in 'advancing' but they weren't interested in me advancing. Would have been easier if we'd just... focused on the work, no?

It turns out that being able to spend every moment in the office promoting yourself as a "10x rockstar" was more important than ever delivering a single impactful project.

Wouldn’t it be an upside to a mediocre manager to have underlings not trying to escape their team nor gunning for the manager’s position?

It's more like nobody believes he is needed if he is the only person in the office.

When everyone is onsite except for a few team members, that's a recipe for disaster. Everyone needs to go remote.

These are all amazing cities and for some reason tech companies choose to locate in San Francisco over these places... It honestly boggles my mind.

Southern US - Raleigh < Atlanta = Austin

B: Have you tried offering what they say they want?

A: How dare you? Stop whining and get back to work.

A: Now, as I was saying about that developer shortage...

Yes, people who are satisfied with what’s currently on offer are satisfied. What exactly are you saying?

Face to face conversations work just as well wherever you are, and research indicates they are actually more prevalent when both private and collaborative spaces are available vs. one room for everything.

Maybe I'm just underqualified and not that good at all, maybe I'm doing something wrong in my search or I need to move to the valley or something. But thus far all my applications have been a complete waste of time and it seems foolish to continue down this path.

interesting. what location?

The capital markets care about the bottom line, not about internal cost structure.

So for example, a company with 100 devs and 1 CEO looks exactly the same to "capital markets" if the CEO makes $105m and each dev makes $100k, or if the CEO makes $5m and each dev makes $1.1m.

There's quite a large room to change the current cost structure without eating into the margins.

Beyond that, those margins at tech companies tend to be quite wide, giving even more room for flexibility.

All I've seen are 30-50% increases over something like a decade. These are hardly "crazy" increases for a field in which profits have gone through the roof, and they only apply to the "top end" as you say.

Developers below that top - i.e. the majority - have seen very modest increases at best.

Check how much executive pay increased over the same time span, to get an idea of "crazy growth".

Costs are to be minimised while those preceived as adding value like sales, marketing, c-level execs get paid accordingly.

In industries that are unionised, collective action gives you the leverage and backup to say enough - but we don't even have an industry body that requires membership like the IEEE or AMA.

Companies love the free market when it benefits them and hate it when it benefits skilled workers.

These companies do exist.

I've worked with a company where developers were hired to "glue these two off-the-shelf systems we bought a year ago together", but the implementation was laughably poor. From talking to this specific company's executives, I found that they were confused as to why things were always behind or why they were running into so many bugs. They told me that they were having difficulty accessing software engineers and that there was a market shortage.

What they didn't tell me was that their current "software developers" were ex-military operations folks with no actual dev experience, and that they posted on Indeed/LinkedIn but wanted local talent (in NC, not the Bay Area) and only offered $50k/yr salary with no real benefits.

Wanting only local talent (instead of remote) already reduced their available developer pool by 99%, and the terrible salary put the nail in the coffin. But to company executives, all of this only proved that they lacked access to software developers.