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Comment by throwaway0asd | Hacker News Reader

The business reason is to simplify candidate selection to a narrow common criteria and never invest in training. Developers are typically viewed as a disloyal disposable commodity. From a business perspective developers are a cost center, not a revenue generator.

Financially that reasoning makes sense but economically it’s stupid because you will end up with the same shitty uncompetitive product as everyone else. The developer counter argument is to just raise salaries, but over that past 2 years salaries have exploded and yet businesses have doubled down on this idea of prioritizing candidate selection and no training.

To your point about code quality I agree. I have an OS frontend written in JavaScript that fully loads (completes page render with state restoration) in under 200ms according to Chrome’s performance tool. The code is about 340kb unminified. You won’t that with React.

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> Financially that reasoning makes sense but economically it’s stupid

What’s the distinction you’re making here? To me it looks like you’re contradicting yourself, but I’m happy to admit I might be ignorant.

They mean short term financial gains vs long term economic success

The solution is to separate creators from maintainers. You don't pay your janitors the same as your architects. The way we get there - standardization.

An interesting thought - it is so much easier to learn to contribute good code to an area you’re unfamiliar with when the codebase is already beautifully designed.

It’s a teaching tool in itself. You can essentially hire a janitor and make them an architect when everything just makes sense already and guides them in the right direction.

> Developers are typically viewed as a disloyal disposable commodity [...] Financially that reasoning makes sense but economically it’s stupid because you will end up with the same shitty uncompetitive product as everyone else.

Which has always been my answer to over aggressive management strategies for "replaceable devs": If your product is fundamentally software, it will be as replaceable and disposable as your developers; Show some commitment instead and you will get it in return from worthwhile devs.

I mean, you can’t close your eyes and spit anywhere on HN without someone chastising someone else for sticking with the same company for more than two years. Disposable developer culture is perpetuated by all sides.

Right but the reason for that culture is because businesses refuse to give competitive raises. I actually tried to stay with my last company but after my two year mark I was way more valuable than my current salary. I told my manager that, they agreed, said they wanted to keep me and asked for a number. I said what would have been a 60% raise and they literally laughed in my face. So I quit and in a month I got a 100% raise. Like it’s not like I had some inflated ego, over the next 6 months my entire team except for the guy on a work visa did the same thing.

I absolutely hate it, why do that?

Moving can double or triple your paycheck overnight. If you're not learning, networking, or growing, fire your employer.

I think this behaviour can also be inline with the other side of the problem though:

Employees perception of growth: it's easy to feel like you are learning more when it's something brand new because of how easy any topic is at the beginning, and you inevitably get more new things when moving; whereas pushing your existing abilities and strengths into incrementally more advanced areas is harder won and requires more fortitude. Also focus on short term financial gains over long term career growth: Although jumping ship has a tendency to force a re-align of financial reward with ability, it also resets your progress reducing your experience on long term project and denying yourself to opportunity to learn from the long term consequences of your decisions, which in turn can affect your long term prospects and financial rewards. (I am suspicious of candidates with a employment history of a series of short stints for this reason, because they did not have to live with the results of their output).

It's subjective, sometimes it's truly not worth staying, sometimes it is... but I suspect many people confuse short term gains with reasons to move, when their current job may in-fact be of more mutual benefit long term.

Agree 100% though also sadly, I wonder if in practice website quality matters. Consumers are used to laggy shitty UIs and assume the problem is their 8-month old hardware.

Of course eventually poor products are unusable, but I wonder if position on the barely-usable-to-snappy generates much revenue differentiation.

340kb is quite impressive for an OS, it seems browser/web has a lot of great apis that are underused.

> From a business perspective developers are a cost center, not a revenue generator.

If you work at a company where the software you write isn't what generates revenue, you're going to have a bad time.

There are plenty of companies where developers are the profit centre.

Agreed, it is unfortunate because there is some cool prolems to solve in places where software is the cost centre but it has never been worth it. In my experience, the irony is that places where software is a cost centre often run really inefficiently from a software developmemt point of view. So it's more costly and less funded, it can be difficult to pull even the simplest projects off in that environment. I am sure there are places that run well though, you just have to have the right people up the chain.

I had seen a lot of devrels meme pre-covid, now they seem to come back.

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