5 ms·

Programmers are a commodity... right?

31 points by random_guy 17y ago

rbranson 17y ago
The problem is that there are far more average or mediocre developers than there are even decent ones, severely diluting our image. Developers are in such high demand, the good pay has caused millions to enter the field that would otherwise be unfit for a typical engineering or scientific field, just because they feel comfortable after a few sessions of hacking together a LAMP app or getting some watered-down MIS degree. Large corporations victimized by their rigid hiring policies have been inundated with thousands of these droids that expend maximum time to build minimum solutions. Further fueling this fire is a total misunderstanding of the process by upper management, whose day-to-day role in the company couldn't be any more antithetical to that of a software developer.
- cjeane 17y ago
  "they couldn’t find anybody and they decided to aim lower." I don't think this ad was being inundated with droids of any sort.
  - rbranson 17y ago
    I am mostly talking about large corporations. It's much easier to determine if a single developer is going to be able to do a short-term gig like this than try to hire an entire department of engineers for a large, long-term project.
- mortenjorck 17y ago
  It's a similar situation for designers, as you can see with some of the recent discussions regarding 99designs. There's good pay at the high end (with a somewhat pronounced falloff), lots of "artsy" kids go into college for it because it's the one art program that promises to actually make them a living, and there's certainly a lot of misunderstanding of the process at the management level.
  - Periodic 17y ago
    I was just wondering if we can extend this to any field. Is it true that every field will have its standouts and then a lot of mediocre members that dilute the image for everyone else? I think the problem is that the barrier to entry is so low in a lot of technical fields right now because demand is high. Companies are willing to hire a lot of mediocre programmers (or outsource to places of questionable quality) because they simply need something and the cost of failure is not catastrophic. On the other hand, medicine and law have high barriers to entry, and you would be considered a fool to hire a doctor or lawyer who did not have the appropriate degrees, certifications, and licenses. This is not true with technology these days. It's like the programming industry doesn't even have a bar to jump over.
Tichy 17y ago
I don't get it, what is the problem? That they offer an internship?
- Alex63 17y ago
  I think the point of the post was that the author assumed all the adds were actually for the same position. The problem (if that was the case) being that C++ programmers/Flash programmers/HTML designers are not interchangeable.
  - Tichy 17y ago
    Even so - in other hacker news post people complain that employers don't understand that programmers are more versatile than just "5 years of Java experience". I have never programmed Flash, but I am pretty sure I could pick it up within 2 days or so. It actually seems cool that they made an ad saying "no experience required". When else do you get that? And it makes perfect sense. Why would a student taking on the challenge be able to learn to program what they need?
j_baker 17y ago
It doesn't surprise me that this happened at a university. They tend to view programmers as a neccessary evil rather than as a potentially valuable asset. Most likely, they didn't get anyone that would work for the salary they wanted to pay.
- gcheong 17y ago
  I would say most companies who depend on software but don't see software products or services as their main thing tend to be this way.
- henrikschroder 17y ago
  KTH is the biggest technical university in Sweden, it's got a very good CS programme and all the other engineering programmes have at least some programming on their curriculums. It's definitely not a dinky little liberal arts college, there's no lack of technical knowledge overall. :-) However, this job ad was posted only outside their little division, because.. well.. uh.. academics are narrow-minded? If they had bothered to post it about four buildings away from their department, it would have been seen by about a thousand CS students instead, which would have increased their chances of getting someone good with quite a lot.
fnid2 17y ago
I went on a sales call yesterday to a small business in my little rural village. His current website was done by someone he knows and I talked to him 6 months ago about it and it hasn't changed, so I whipped up a demo and put it online and went to show him in his office. When he started typing in the URL to the demo site, he was typing http:// http:// into the yahoo search form. I said, "You should type it into the location bar." The what? he said. Up there at the top I told him and pointed at it. Whoa. "Well, you know, my friend is building this one for me and ... " This one was a default wordpress install that had no customization except the header and footer and nothing at all close to what his business needs, yet he had to run my site by his friend, who I can tell has no idea how to write code or create a database. How can any of us here ever expect someone like that to comprehend the difference between someone who can put up a web page and someone who can build an enterprise system with customer interaction, inventory management, and any sort of security whatsoever? They can't. Looking at a web page is like looking at the clothes someone is wearing and trying to figure out if they can do algebra. Yet that's how they do it. To 90% of people, maybe more, putting up a static web page or a word press site requires the same knowledge as understanding one-way hashes, caching, and parameterized queries. And yes, I believe we should charge a lot more, but instead, we give away our software for free because it feels good. I love open source, I create open source, I use open source, yet I know that open source isn't going to feed me. It feeds some. It feeds the business guys who sell services on top of free open source systems. Those guys can't use a command-line, but they can pay programmers 10% of the deal, sometimes more. It feeds programmers who are lucky enough to work for a progressive employer who can afford to staff a team to support the project and defend it when it is stolen by a corporation and embedded in their set top boxes, but for those of us who want to create a path for ourselves, creating an open source project is like buying a lottery ticket. Sometimes it works, Zimbra did well, word press does well, MySQL did well, but those are but a tiny fraction of the open source projects out there. As long as we give away our work for free, why do we expect people to pay for it? Outside the programming world, it is completely different. If a business person, a sales guy say, works for a technology company, they work on commission. Sell one product, take 20-50% of the sale price. If a programmer writes something that increases sales by 50% they get nothing additional. No percentage increase, hardly a raise at most places. Yet, code on. Corporations simply could not operate without IT, yet it is considered a cost center, not a profit enabler, a cost cutter. Imagine a human without a brain! Yet, code on. Why? Because we love it. Doesn't matter that sales guys also love to sell. CEO's also love to execute. When I was a consultant, it angered me greatly that a sales man would win a client and while I was there, I would sell additional project after additional project, extending my time at the client and building more and more revenue for the company and I got a $5k raise the next year! The sales guy got the same commission on the additional work I sold! Why didn't I get the commission on the additional work? Why didn't someone say, "Awesome, you were at the client 5x longer than we expected and you doubled your expected billable hours for the year!" Instead, the sales guy got a new flat screen TV.
nroach 17y ago
Programmers are a commodity. Lawyers are a commodity. Managers are a commodity. Dentists are a commodity. Experts are not. In any given field, probably 80% of the practitioners can do an adequate job and at least complete the tasks required by their position. In my experience, that number narrows to about 40% if the requirement is that the job is performed on time, on budget, and performed correctly the first time. The question for the employer is simply whether the task at hand requires a “cog” or an expert. Most businesses require both.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- random_guy 17y ago
  Agreed. But: I don’t really know exactly what these guys are looking for, still I’m pretty sure (because of the ads) they’re having an hard time finding it. I won’t say programming as a profession is special, because it’s not, but from my experience even finding just a good coding “cog” is a huge win from the employer’s perspective. What I think it happened is that those guys went looking for somebody “ready for industry” into the university, and they hit the wall. I know a lot of very, very smart guys that are studying CS: I’m sure one day they will be awesome hackers but they will need a lot of experience under their belt before they can provide real value to a “real world” project.
  - _delirium 17y ago
    To be fair to CS programs, though, that's true of most areas that have significant practical components. A straight-out-of-college chemical engineer is not going to be able to provide immediate valuable work on a Dow Chemical plant; they need to learn all sorts of things first. One difference might be that Dow expects this more than companies hiring programmers do.

31 points by random_guy 17y ago

The problem is that there are far more average or mediocre developers than there are even decent ones, severely diluting our image. Developers are in such high demand, the good pay has caused millions to enter the field that would otherwise be unfit for a typical engineering or scientific field, just because they feel comfortable after a few sessions of hacking together a LAMP app or getting some watered-down MIS degree. Large corporations victimized by their rigid hiring policies have been inundated with thousands of these droids that expend maximum time to build minimum solutions. Further fueling this fire is a total misunderstanding of the process by upper management, whose day-to-day role in the company couldn't be any more antithetical to that of a software developer.

cjeane 17y ago
"they couldn’t find anybody and they decided to aim lower." I don't think this ad was being inundated with droids of any sort.
- rbranson 17y ago
  I am mostly talking about large corporations. It's much easier to determine if a single developer is going to be able to do a short-term gig like this than try to hire an entire department of engineers for a large, long-term project.
mortenjorck 17y ago
It's a similar situation for designers, as you can see with some of the recent discussions regarding 99designs. There's good pay at the high end (with a somewhat pronounced falloff), lots of "artsy" kids go into college for it because it's the one art program that promises to actually make them a living, and there's certainly a lot of misunderstanding of the process at the management level.
- Periodic 17y ago
  I was just wondering if we can extend this to any field. Is it true that every field will have its standouts and then a lot of mediocre members that dilute the image for everyone else? I think the problem is that the barrier to entry is so low in a lot of technical fields right now because demand is high. Companies are willing to hire a lot of mediocre programmers (or outsource to places of questionable quality) because they simply need something and the cost of failure is not catastrophic. On the other hand, medicine and law have high barriers to entry, and you would be considered a fool to hire a doctor or lawyer who did not have the appropriate degrees, certifications, and licenses. This is not true with technology these days. It's like the programming industry doesn't even have a bar to jump over.

Tichy 17y ago

I don't get it, what is the problem? That they offer an internship?

Alex63 17y ago
I think the point of the post was that the author assumed all the adds were actually for the same position. The problem (if that was the case) being that C++ programmers/Flash programmers/HTML designers are not interchangeable.
- Tichy 17y ago
  Even so - in other hacker news post people complain that employers don't understand that programmers are more versatile than just "5 years of Java experience". I have never programmed Flash, but I am pretty sure I could pick it up within 2 days or so. It actually seems cool that they made an ad saying "no experience required". When else do you get that? And it makes perfect sense. Why would a student taking on the challenge be able to learn to program what they need?

j_baker 17y ago

It doesn't surprise me that this happened at a university. They tend to view programmers as a neccessary evil rather than as a potentially valuable asset. Most likely, they didn't get anyone that would work for the salary they wanted to pay.

gcheong 17y ago
I would say most companies who depend on software but don't see software products or services as their main thing tend to be this way.
henrikschroder 17y ago
KTH is the biggest technical university in Sweden, it's got a very good CS programme and all the other engineering programmes have at least some programming on their curriculums. It's definitely not a dinky little liberal arts college, there's no lack of technical knowledge overall. :-) However, this job ad was posted only outside their little division, because.. well.. uh.. academics are narrow-minded? If they had bothered to post it about four buildings away from their department, it would have been seen by about a thousand CS students instead, which would have increased their chances of getting someone good with quite a lot.

fnid2 17y ago

I went on a sales call yesterday to a small business in my little rural village. His current website was done by someone he knows and I talked to him 6 months ago about it and it hasn't changed, so I whipped up a demo and put it online and went to show him in his office. When he started typing in the URL to the demo site, he was typing http:// http:// into the yahoo search form. I said, "You should type it into the location bar." The what? he said. Up there at the top I told him and pointed at it. Whoa. "Well, you know, my friend is building this one for me and ... " This one was a default wordpress install that had no customization except the header and footer and nothing at all close to what his business needs, yet he had to run my site by his friend, who I can tell has no idea how to write code or create a database. How can any of us here ever expect someone like that to comprehend the difference between someone who can put up a web page and someone who can build an enterprise system with customer interaction, inventory management, and any sort of security whatsoever? They can't. Looking at a web page is like looking at the clothes someone is wearing and trying to figure out if they can do algebra. Yet that's how they do it. To 90% of people, maybe more, putting up a static web page or a word press site requires the same knowledge as understanding one-way hashes, caching, and parameterized queries. And yes, I believe we should charge a lot more, but instead, we give away our software for free because it feels good. I love open source, I create open source, I use open source, yet I know that open source isn't going to feed me. It feeds some. It feeds the business guys who sell services on top of free open source systems. Those guys can't use a command-line, but they can pay programmers 10% of the deal, sometimes more. It feeds programmers who are lucky enough to work for a progressive employer who can afford to staff a team to support the project and defend it when it is stolen by a corporation and embedded in their set top boxes, but for those of us who want to create a path for ourselves, creating an open source project is like buying a lottery ticket. Sometimes it works, Zimbra did well, word press does well, MySQL did well, but those are but a tiny fraction of the open source projects out there. As long as we give away our work for free, why do we expect people to pay for it? Outside the programming world, it is completely different. If a business person, a sales guy say, works for a technology company, they work on commission. Sell one product, take 20-50% of the sale price. If a programmer writes something that increases sales by 50% they get nothing additional. No percentage increase, hardly a raise at most places. Yet, code on. Corporations simply could not operate without IT, yet it is considered a cost center, not a profit enabler, a cost cutter. Imagine a human without a brain! Yet, code on. Why? Because we love it. Doesn't matter that sales guys also love to sell. CEO's also love to execute. When I was a consultant, it angered me greatly that a sales man would win a client and while I was there, I would sell additional project after additional project, extending my time at the client and building more and more revenue for the company and I got a $5k raise the next year! The sales guy got the same commission on the additional work I sold! Why didn't I get the commission on the additional work? Why didn't someone say, "Awesome, you were at the client 5x longer than we expected and you doubled your expected billable hours for the year!" Instead, the sales guy got a new flat screen TV.

nroach 17y ago

Programmers are a commodity. Lawyers are a commodity. Managers are a commodity. Dentists are a commodity. Experts are not. In any given field, probably 80% of the practitioners can do an adequate job and at least complete the tasks required by their position. In my experience, that number narrows to about 40% if the requirement is that the job is performed on time, on budget, and performed correctly the first time. The question for the employer is simply whether the task at hand requires a “cog” or an expert. Most businesses require both.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
random_guy 17y ago
Agreed. But: I don’t really know exactly what these guys are looking for, still I’m pretty sure (because of the ads) they’re having an hard time finding it. I won’t say programming as a profession is special, because it’s not, but from my experience even finding just a good coding “cog” is a huge win from the employer’s perspective. What I think it happened is that those guys went looking for somebody “ready for industry” into the university, and they hit the wall. I know a lot of very, very smart guys that are studying CS: I’m sure one day they will be awesome hackers but they will need a lot of experience under their belt before they can provide real value to a “real world” project.
- _delirium 17y ago
  To be fair to CS programs, though, that's true of most areas that have significant practical components. A straight-out-of-college chemical engineer is not going to be able to provide immediate valuable work on a Dow Chemical plant; they need to learn all sorts of things first. One difference might be that Dow expects this more than companies hiring programmers do.