Re:Companies worry more about access to software developers ...
by dragonwriter on Wednesday September 12, 2018 @12:50PM
(#17970663)
> Curious how articles like these almost never give the most obvious advice to businesses, which is: pay developers more.
“access to” includes, and really is largely a way of saying, “cost of”. Paying more isn't the solution to their complaint, it is the problem they are complaining about.
> > If developers are your company's most constraining resource, the key question is how to increase their productivity.
> This is quite surprising: developers are seen as a scarce valuable resource, and in a free market that means they should be rewarded for their rare and hard-won skillset.
Yes, they are. That makes them expensive, leading naturally to people seeking efficiencies in their utilization.
> Instead, the universal advice is to pressure them to be more productive, outsource them, etc.
That's not instead of them being expensive in the market, that is a consequence of them being expensive in the market: if a company is constrained by a scarce resource—one which it is expensive to get more of—then either (a) finding ways to get more output per unit of the scarce resource or (b) finding substitutes fornor untapped supplies of the scarce resource are obvious ways of addressing the complaint. The cost of acquiring more of the scarce resource from existing (e.g., not untapped) supplies is the problem you are trying to mitigate.
“access to” includes, and really is largely a way of saying, “cost of”. Paying more isn't the solution to their complaint, it is the problem they are complaining about.
> > If developers are your company's most constraining resource, the key question is how to increase their productivity.
> This is quite surprising: developers are seen as a scarce valuable resource, and in a free market that means they should be rewarded for their rare and hard-won skillset.
Yes, they are. That makes them expensive, leading naturally to people seeking efficiencies in their utilization.
> Instead, the universal advice is to pressure them to be more productive, outsource them, etc.
That's not instead of them being expensive in the market, that is a consequence of them being expensive in the market: if a company is constrained by a scarce resource—one which it is expensive to get more of—then either (a) finding ways to get more output per unit of the scarce resource or (b) finding substitutes fornor untapped supplies of the scarce resource are obvious ways of addressing the complaint. The cost of acquiring more of the scarce resource from existing (e.g., not untapped) supplies is the problem you are trying to mitigate.