Sunrise developeromics

From translator

Reading a few years ago, the magazine Forbes , I came across an article that I found extremely interesting. Well, you know how it happens - you read, you read, and in every paragraph you exclaim, “Oh! Well, about me! ” I could not believe that I was the only one, and no one would be honored if not translated, then at least to refer to her in the Russian-language press. However, this has not happened in four years. Well, “if you want to do something right - do it yourself”, therefore, I give to the attention of the respectable public the first half of the article. (I try to translate artistically, so the work does not move quickly; the size of the original is more than 30 kilobytes, and “having lived on earth to half,” I realized that I have no more strength to hold on .)

PS I could not figure out how to put the "translation" tag in the title.

Sunrise developeromics

^{Article Venkatesha Rao published in December 2011 in the magazine "Forbes".}

In evolutionary biology, there is a theory that mutual altruism and cooperation arose as a solution to the problem of food storage. If you, an early hominid, were lucky enough to overwhelm a large mammoth, you didn’t have the slightest chance to wipe it out completely before it gets rotten. Then you shared food: the best investment for excess capital was an investment in your buddy's stomach. In this case, you could demand the return of the contribution at the time when the mammoth is already filled up by this same friend.
')
Recently, I thought about this little idea in the context of human wealth. Unless you are a professional investor (and even if you are), now finding places to store surplus capital where he would be safe and not be depreciated too quickly (not to mention generating income) is becoming more and more difficult. The stock market is increasingly thinking about the bloody feast of “bears”. Volatility and unexpected short rallies make playing with short positions unsafe. Even the storage of assets in dollars seems to be fraught with its dangers - thanks to the threat of devaluation and all sorts of newfangled words like “quantitative easing,” which we, average investors, hear for the first time. The euro now also does not look like a bright alternative. The decision to invest in gold - and in general in any raw material - seems to require a somewhat apocalyptic view of the world, and reflections on how you plan to gain access to the actual property in case everything really goes to hell (I would like to note that The present moment can not call such a view of the world so unjustified).

But there is one safe haven - if you know how to invest in it: software developers.

Rational investments in the run-up to the apocalypse

One absolutely secure place to save your capital today - if you know how - these are software developers' wallets. If the world survives at all the perils of a looming economic apocalypse, then this is the only investment that will endure all storms out of spite. It doesn't matter if you are a private person or a corporation, or where in the developed world you live. You should find a way to invest in programmers.

In the text below, I will specifically speak about developers as if they were a commodity in a butcher shop. From a practical point of view, they are as such, since most of them have not found a way to use their rarity as an advantage. From what follows: if they did not find such a method, someone else will find it. Under capitalism, each has only three options: you can be either a capitalist, or someone else's capital, or completely useless from an economic point of view. In today's context, these options look like this: you can invest in developers, be a developer, or be a gray mass. In other words, if you own a seemingly much more fundamental profession — say, you are a baker in your bakery — you are practically useless: not because bread itself is not important, but because the question of survival in the bread business is how many developers are behind you to help you win the battle in the game that Yelp, Groupon and other software companies are leading in their field. If your bakery does not have its own iPhone app, it will soon beg for mercy on guys like Yelp.

And God forbid, if you do not have the qualifications - say, in the field of the same breadmaking - that the developer-oriented economy could use: then you are in considerable danger. One of the reasons why the Occupy Wall Street movement did not have the proper influence - looking at the number of people involved in it - is that most of them simply did not have any cards in their hands that would have at least some value in the game of economic poker.

We will move from the look of the butcher shop to the more humanistic one at the end of this article.

Investing in good developers at the moment is such a good bet that if you have money and you happen to stumble upon a talented developer who you seem to like and who is willing to work for you, then pay him to write for you anything - anything! - even if you do not have a single good idea (they are worth nothing: I will sell them to you for five kopecks a bundle). If you have no money - offer him anything, which you have at the moment in abundance. The net present value of a strong and positive relationship with a talented developer is ridiculously high today. If you earn his trust so much that he is ready to give up his current project in order to join yours, his value jumps to the skies. The secret door behind the painted hearth in front of you - and it opens your developer.

(I honestly warned you that I would object and dehumanize programmers.)

On the other hand, I knew people who had complementary talents — for example, talent to flourish investors or promote a product on the market — who responded with devotion to dedication — for example, insisted that their trusted developers take part in the project, even if rejection of this condition meant disrupting a multimillion dollar deal. .

But the rules for investing in development capital are completely different from the rules for investing in other types of human capital (a term introduced by economist Arthur Lewis in 1953 - at the height of the industrial economy) or traditional capital resources. You don’t stock programmers the same way you stock builders, soldiers, chemists, engineers, real estate, or dollars (moreover, even the word “stock” is not suitable here - you have to think in terms that John Hagel calls threads ’, but this is subtle which we will ignore in this article, and we will use the metaphor of "stocks").

At the moment, the only thing that is potentially more valuable than a good relationship with a high-class developer is an acquaintance with a specialist “survivalist” who has first-hand knowledge of weapons, underground shelters, huts-in-the-woods, and the like. in which world currency will be ammunition). Which of these options is best placed is up to you, depending on the level of pessimism of your view of the world. Personally, I am pessimistic - but still not enough to make capital investments in the "survivors". The software industry understands this, and tries to stock up with high-quality programmer talents (the key word is “high-quality”) as quickly as possible — by any means, up to the absorption of small companies with large numbers solely for the purpose of getting talented developers at their disposal, with a clear intention to throw out at the same time, in the trash any other assets that will be acquired "in the load" (which gives a new meaning to the expression "the acquisition of talent").

While the software is devouring the world , and each company is turning into a software company , people in other sectors of the economy are beginning to slowly understand what is happening around, and belatedly try to join the race in order to catch their piece of cake. Almost inevitably, they will not succeed - unless they learn to compete with, strictly speaking, the software industry itself. But more about that below.

Anatomy of wars for programmer talents

In the midst of an extremely depressed labor market, true despair, seen in the wars for programmer talent, looks incredible. Almost every day I see big companies, small companies, multi-skilled entrepreneurs, start-up entrepreneurs, and even venture capitalists go hunting for smart heads. Talent hunters flooded LinkedIn, set up Quora snares, and set the seine on Facebook and Google+. The cartoons depicting the homeless kind of CEO , holding in their hands the “looking for a co-founder with a technical vein” placard, are walking around. Damn it, I myself am one of these hunters (by the way, is there a cool iOS developer among you who agrees to cooperate with me?).

The eager new investors angels are ready to throw money into any project in which one or another strong developer participates, hoping that even if this project fails, it’s worth being in the front row of investors of the next project of this same developer.

Entire startups were created solely to ensure that good development teams stay together.

Golden cages with workplaces to which delicacies buffets are attached, high-tech sleeping places and kindergartens are just the tip of the iceberg.

These are mostly mechanisms available for large — “too big to collapse” — software companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft. In the game, where these top league players set the lower bar for monetary (and not only - like quality of life) remuneration for work, and start-up start-ups take the fact that they provide a real opportunity to hit a really big sum, no other kind of business has the slightest chance of competing for major talents, no matter how much cash or shares he throws onto the negotiating table.

The wars for talent actually occur in a much larger arena. The battle for the minds of talented developers begins much earlier than they can even think about paid work. Sometimes it starts in high school. The fact is that the software industry - unlike any other - is able to take talent into its bosom much earlier than any other, pushing it in the right direction by accustoming to certain programming languages, program environments, data formats and tools. A talented tenth-grader who started writing programs for the iPhone at the age of 14 is likely to remain in the sphere of attraction of Apple throughout his career. The kid, whose first programming experience is an overlay to Google Maps, made using the tools provided by Google and the API, will also most likely revolve around Google. In particular, the fact about Google that the investments they made in Python (one of the three programming languages ​​that the company uses in its work) were partly their strategic bet on an undervalued language made when they noticed that other companies overlooked the growing number of talented Python programmers.

As a result, all of them are large software companies sitting on mountains of cash; startups beckoning; and industry insiders with the “right connections” - sucking up all the high-quality talents on the market, leaving all other industries and sectors to suck their elbows.

All this creates an unprecedented divide between the haves of talent and the have-nots. It will soon surpass the infamous geopolitical divide between North and South . I, by the way, do not exaggerate.

The phenomenon of rarity "decadators"

Why does the general trend of increasing unemployment bypass the software industry (or, at least, its thriving part)? Is that a technological bubble again?

Yes and no. The markets of technologies that are currently being explored may actually turn into puzryami, but to the extent that investments are investments in people who will spend their careers in the industry - no.

It is interesting to note that “investing in people” is such an expected model of work in the software industry that companies that are consciously knocked out of it, like Sequoia Capital, have to specifically explain that they invest in markets and trends, and not in people, not in teams. In any other industry, this would be a no brainer. It is clear, for example, that the energy industry is investing in promising energy sales markets and alternative energy trends, and not in energy experts. In other industries, investing in people is a strategy that is the lot of a few (such as Zappos in the footwear trade or Southwest in the airline industry).

One of the reasons why this is happening is that the talent of developers is incredibly difficult to assess in advance, and its value may very much depend on the situation, which means that the inflow and outflow of personnel must be large (since the potential star may not get the required development in your environment). Human risks are high enough for the development of the ability to cope with them to be necessary for success. Traditional mechanisms like universities are not very successfully coping with the creation - and even with the discovery and discovery of the talent of outstanding developers. It comes to the fact that the luminaries of the industry like Peter Thiel offer - very mischievously - to pay truly talented developers to drop out of college and instead go the ways of startups.

Another reason is that the ability to program is the most portable high-level ability on the planet. Seeing and temporarily attracting talents does not mean that you will be able to keep them. With the exception of optional slavery and “golden handcuffs” for talents from absorbed companies, you have nothing to oppose to social and economic mobility. Software developers can not only with ease. jump from one industry to another - they are even able to survive on their own with unprecedented ease. A nuclear engineer will not be able to earn his living if he is not given a reactor or a bomb to work on. The biochemist needs a laboratory and a squad of lawyers who are able to provide him with cover in the fight against the FDA . Software development, on the contrary, is able to freely float on the Internet, earning his penny by mercenary, not forming deep attachments, if he so wishes. Until the Internet is turned off, no other profession can even compare with software development in terms of freedom, which the latter gives to those who have succeeded in it.

But the main reason is the phenomenon of "ten-men".

You see, the level of programmer talent is amazingly nonlinear. There is even a special term - “decadrable” (a well-known idea, originally belonging to Frederick Brooks , is that the efficiency of a good programmer’s work is not “slightly higher” than the average efficiency in the profession - but higher by an order of magnitude . In programming, Experience increases exponentially due to the very nature of technology.

Although the phenomenon of “tenfoldness” also exists in some other areas, nowhere does it have such a dominant meaning, except in programming. Moreover, while other industries invented techniques by which middle-level workers (say, chemists or accountants) manage to use synergistically on an ongoing basis, the software industry did not. In her, this effect is still something like black magic.

One of the reasons for this lies in the fact that other industries, as a rule, turn “short-winners” into “ten-timers” using software tools (for example, an engineer who was seated at a computer with a CAD system, somehow suddenly becomes an engineer-ten-timers ). Yes, the world is full of lotions that programmers have written for themselves, but the phenomenon of “ten-timers”, as well as the dependence of the industry on it, somehow fails to get rid of — neither by engineering nor by management. Because the "decadators" continue to invent new tools for themselves - in order to continue to be "decimals."

Therefore, the level of employment and should be higher - while the “ten-trackers” are recognized and trapped.

( Ending follows .)