I feel a lot of firms have devalued experienced engineers to their peril. They should continue to work and be compensated according to their skill and experience. Good devs shouldn't stop coding unless they are bored with it. Ok maybe they are a bit more successful ). I hear Valve operates in a similar manner and their success mirrors our own. Coders are given independence and have ownership, and quality is their mandate. You could say that the managerial-level decision making is informally shared among the senior engineers. Devs participate in all levels of decision making, including the assignment of features/projects to younger devs, and oversight of their proteges. I now work for a company that has roughly a 1:70 ratio of manager:dev, and it's great. While this may not apply to you, I can see where he's coming from. These managers did no coding whatsoever (some barely understood what we were doing), and spent their time inventing metrics, discussing/presenting these metrics, and making sure devs did the absolute minimum required to satisfy the customer because all they ever looked at were those metrics. I've worked in organizations with 1:10 manager:dev ratio, sometimes higher. You can't fire people when you don't have anyone to hire to fill their spot. I think the trend recently ticked up but for almost a decade the number of programmers graduating in the US went down every year. Yet as a programmer, I call it job security, there will be fewer people for an every increasing amount of my jobs. On top of that, did you read today that the University of Florida just killed their ENTIRE Computer Science department? Seriously, it boggles the mind that a school could be so completely clueless. those who go out and learn on their own to keep themselves current will continue to be worth the extra money, those that don't will simply make it easier for those of us who do. Will it save me completely? No, but in no other field can you self teach yourself into the skills you need to have tomorrow. But I have years of experience they don't have and my employer knows this. I'm expensive compared to fresh out of college kid. #SOFTWARE LIKE CADNAA SOFTWARE#I'm a 42 yr old software engineer/programmer and I know the drill. Because if it kicks you in the ass a year after your parachute opened.what the hell do you really care? golden parachutes that kick in after only a few years) their decisions are going to be *very* suspect when it comes to long term knowledge of who to keep and who to get rid of. Long story short, when a CEO/Board who have no long term vested interest (i.e. That didn't end up being very successful. I specifically of one team that was downsized from 35 to literally 1 person with a few 'off shore' techs to handle support. In fact Xerox laid off so many people and outsourced so many others that within 5 years had to hire my dad and many others back because the people who actually knew anything were gone in the wave of cuts.Īnd it has cost them dearly both financially and in reputation. My dad was laid off by them in his upper 50s and he fully qualified as a 'middle manager'. They'll learn that new stuff faster than you can say "get off my lawn". net, AJAX, XML, "in the cloud" and whatever newfangled crap you throw at them. Experienced coders have no problem doing IPv6. *That* is why you want to keep increasing their salary. Compared to novice coders, they're an absolute bargain. It's the experienced coders that you want. Being undervalued for their accomplishments, do you think it's strange developers switch career? Yet, despite much better quality, lower risk and ten-fold productivity, it's rare to see more than a five-fold difference in salary. They meet deadlines more consistently too. #SOFTWARE LIKE CADNAA CODE#An experienced software engineer can be ten times as productive as a novice, will solve the same problems in less, more elegant, more maintainable code and have lower bug rates. They should be paid more, because they're worth more. Why does salary need to keep going up? Simple. Now let's assume a company with highly talented individuals. Better-than-average as in 98% of the world population won't ever be a good software engineer, no matter how much time and effort they put in it, because they simply don't have the brains for it. Being a (good) software engineer takes a better-than-average brain. You've got it right when you say "compared to normal people".
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