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Comment by mavelikara | Hacker News Reader

> Your company is profitable but has slow organic growth in revenue/profit (single or low double digits).

> Since salaries (especially in the tech sector) are rising much faster per year than your growth or inflation for that matter, you must pay much more to the new hires.

> In the current artificially inflated tech market (thanks to easy money),

By some accident engineers have offered their time to this business which is unable to put their efforts to good economic use, and hence unable to pay market-competitive salaries. The management at this firm needs to think hard if they really need expensive skills as inputs, and if they do, why are the returns so meager.

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I grant you the point, that you need capable Management

However, your advise is not very actionable, given that the current market is one hot bubble, where investments and valuation is not longer based on market fundamentals, see [1].

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26478875

Or to put it in other words: perhaps there is a market for better tools that would allow less skilled people (or just less people) to produce the same outputs

That's not a complete rephrasing. It's possible the current designs and processes cannot accommodate more productivity but the relevant market segment is fine. I expect there are multiple contributors to the problem. I'd avoid explaining it all away with a single cause, even one as compelling as "let's figure out how to throw more brains at the problem".

Sure, I have no idea about the specific company cited; but I do think that most of the effort spent by most of software developers in most of the companies is wasted on details that are not manifest to people who don't have direct experience with the job on a daily basis (either as working developers or by people managing them). The farther up and out you go, the easier is it to underappreciated the rabbit hole that software development is, and thus to underestimate the costs. And to, once realizing that, still be baffled at how it is possible that "just doing this little thing was really supposed to cost that much?". Many just don't invest the "right" amount of resources, judging that there is something wrong with all that, that we're either subject to an overinflated salary bubble or something else.

That's pretty much always true. Actually making those better tools turns out to be a hard problem.

Also don't underestimate how hard it is to sell otherwise good tools

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