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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

Strange.

"A majority of companies say lack of access to software developers is a bigger threat to success than lack of access to capital."

Capital gives access to software developers but software developers don't necessarily give access to capital.

Mr. Will Gaybrick doesn't seem to get his causality right.

"Tech's ultimate success: Software developers are now more valuable to companies than money"

That's just stupid.

"2. Outsource. Fully embrace the cloud. Not just for storage and compute but for every business function that's not unique to your business"

Custom tooling is one of the most valuable part of having in-house programmers.

It's interesting to read the thoughts of these suits. It explains so much of my everyday troubles at work.

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I agree, I thought the piece was very odd.

"If you're considering buy vs. build, the answer is simple: buy."

If you're not going to write or implement anything more advanced than "glue these two off-the-shelf systems we bought a year ago together", why are you so concerned about access to software developers?

There's a few reasons why: many businesses are in geographic locations where there's not as much software presence, they don't know how to hire correctly, and they don't want to swallow the bitter pill of "software developers cost significantly more than minimum-wage employees".

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.

Most of the time when business executives talk about “lack of available talent”, they usually mean “lack of talent at the price I’m willing to pay”.

Everyone’s a free market enthusiast until the market says they have to pay more, it turns out.

At current prices it’s entirely possible that some software businesses are not viable. Saying that out loud (or even admitting it to yourself) is not a great look.

Further, the software industry is such that failures are more common to successes when it comes to software projects. I suspect if that ratio got better or predictability did, we’d see wages rise even more (at least for those predictably successful devs). As it stands you can throw all of the money at the software hiring problem and still be making a terrible gamble on whether you’ll get software out of it.

The first point is possible, but given an era of super low taxes and massive stock buybacks, I doubt that many of these places can't afford developers, I bet they just would prefer to use that money elsewhere.

I think your latter point is much closer to the mark.

Funny thing is I am trying to get some people from market where they don't make a lot of money and trying to pay 1.5 to 2x what they can get. Still getting people to work is a hassle. I also have no need for ninja/rockstars. It might be that they have comfy jobs already and are afraid of change... Free market is not just about money it still is complicated mixture. So just calling executives greedy is not catch all truth. Maybe I should try to pay 3x more, but business is not there for 3x average salaries for that area.

Maybe it's possible that the fair market rate is actually 3X the local average salary? If that's true then my original point stands, that there are devs, you just can't/won't afford them.

Of course, there could be other factors at play, as you mentioned. Life is complicated, economics more so.

The same can be said of private individuals and housing. But that doesn't mean the level of willingness to pay is trivial or unjustified, and it doesn't mean people who think house prices are too high are greedy.

There's a pretty big difference between purchasing a home and hiring someone's services with the expectation of making a profit.

Of course. But there's also a lot about the two that are similar. The commonality I observed is one of them.

Strange.

The reason this article seems off is because it's trying to capitalize on an earlier article by Nick Bilton, but this attempt at adaptation is missing the essence and mangles the point. The idea this article is trying to convey is better presented here:

We're F--ked: There is only One Antidote to Silicon Valley's Ills... Their Engineers

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/there-is-only-one-an...

Developers are a limited resource, at least for short enough time scales, while capital isn’t. Especially with interest and taxes so low.

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