Becoming Globally Competitive In Software

Argument #1: We over-pay the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

Question 1:  Is a kid graduating from a university with a comp-sci degree really worth $55-65k dollars a year when they have zero experience, zero clue, and no idea what it takes to deliver a sixty system, one-hundred forty sub-system infrastructure from conception to delivery in a geographically distributed team of one hundred or more people? 

Question 2:  Is a person with fifteen successful years of experience doing inception to implementation software development worth less because they have no degree or don’t know the latest programming language? 

Question 3:  Is a person who worked at a Fortune 50 company worth more salary and sign-on bonus than someone who cut their teeth at an unheard of 800 person company with evidential success at delivering measurable customer-defined value every single time in their career? 

Question 4:  Is a person who doesn’t understand the economic impact of poorly executed software projects to a company really worth $120k a year just because they’ve been there fifteen years, built the “first system at this company”, or have advanced degrees? 

Question 5:  If I can’t articulate what it costs to do it right, and I can’t articulate what it costs when you do it wrong, what value am I bringing to the table for my company or customer?  Am I still worth the > $100k a year if I can’t identify and communicate the return on investment, cost of acquisition, and cost of ownership for the software system I told the customer he needed to build from the ground up? 

It’s not just about delivering what was requested, but about helping the customer manage their own economics by influencing things like risk, cost, scalability, adaptability, maneuverability, and time to market in the favor of the customer before yourself.  Your salary should not equate to your pedigree(s), but rather to the value you bring to the table as measured by the customer.

Argument #2: We pass the costs on to the customer and do not provide equitable value. 

We do things that seem impressive, but don’t actually contribute to solving the customers’ pain.   

Example 1:  Giant software delivery process frameworks requiring hundreds of documents that discuss building something to address the problem statement and don’t actually do anything for the customer directly, but cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to generate and maintain.

Example 2:  Expensive software and hardware infrastructures with high acquisition costs, high cost of ownership, long return on investment windows, high staffing and education costs, and niche, hard-to-find people to administer the system - all without clear benefits to the customer that they can see, touch, understand and affirm value to the benefit of their competitive edge.