
We're entering the decade of the developer - da5e
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=6020&tag=content;leftCol
======
azanar
_The really good IT professionals will still cost you a pretty penny, but
they’re worth it because they can make your organization more efficient or
innovative, or both._

So, in other words, the not-so-really-good IT professionals should commit
themselves to chasing the next rainbow, which this author has asserted is
software development. I don't see how this is going to benefit anyone
involved.

The people who chased the IT promise of huge salaries in the last decade or
two are already jaded because those salaries came with an an expectation that
they deliver as much value as the superstars. Given the oft repeated
statistics and horror stories and such, I'd suspect most of them struggled to
generate even as much value as their employer paid them, let alone actually be
profitable to employ.[1] So they entrenched as best they could, and tried to
make themselves valuable by hoarding knowledge and trading political capital.
This worked until the knowledge they hoarded became irrelevant, because
better, easier technology became directly accessible to the people the IT
department supported. The technology certainly didn't require no support, but
it required much less, and the best people in IT had already learned about it
because they actually like their profession and spend their own time being
curious.

Ironically, I've noticed a tendency for people in IT to be really staunch neo-
luddites; the same forces that made them valuable are now making them
irrelevant, and they were too narrow-focussed on their own walled garden of
knowledge to notice that the process never stopped. So, now they are waving at
barn-doors. I'm sure they'd have shrugged their arms at elevator operators
when those became fully automated.

So, what now if they flood into the world of software development? I suspect
one of two things will end up happening. Either they'll be met with a wall of
high expectations that won't even let them in, or they'll go through another
cycle of entrenchment followed by irrelevance, with the same knee-jerk
reaction of trying to blame technology for continuing to advance. It will
probably be a blend, where some places will set high expectations and refuse
to let anything but the really good people in, and the rest will suffer from
entrenchment of the workforce.

So here's my tl;dr point: it's not about the IT vs. developer delineation. It
never has been. In fact, a lot of the people who start these ISVs and write
these small modular apps have to play _both_ roles at once. It is about the
passionate and capable people vs. the one's who chase rainbows and try to ride
along long enough to get some sort of windfall. The latter has never been a
sound personal economic strategy; the only difference now is that technology
iterates rapidly enough that the not-so-really-good get found out a lot
sooner. If anything, I think _that_ will be the next decade.

[1] Either that, or all of the statistics and stories are crap, but I would
believe that more if they weren't repeated by people who have had decades in
the industry.

------
wallflower
> Industrious developers can even work for a big company or an app development
> team as a day job and then moonlight as an independent developer with a few
> of his or her own apps that can potentially generate residual income.

If your side project ever gets big enough, your company could easily sue for
partial ownership. How? By invoking 'discovery' to get access to your private
GMail to prove you sent emails about your side project during work hours.
Unless, of course, you manage to completely firewall all side project work
from your day job hours. More likely, your side project never becomes so
lucrative that a company will sue you for ownership and risk being skewered
online with a "Big Bad Company X is suing little Indie Me"

<http://blog.asmartbear.com/working-startup.html>

~~~
Silhouette
1\. Never work on your personal project on your employer's time. They're
paying for that time, and probably the resources you're using during that time
as well, so they have a legitimate claim on anything you do at work.

2\. Never sign an employment contract that gives any rights to stuff you do
away from work to your employer, or that gives your employer any right to
control what you may do out of hours as long as it doesn't affect your ability
to do your job properly when you're at work.

In short, you _should_ completely firewall any side project from work. If your
contract doesn't allow for this and your employer won't give you a clear,
specific exception, then you have to decide whether to keep the employer or
the side project, but you can't do both.

~~~
wallflower
When I was more naive than I am now, I signed the yeah-all-your-IP-belongs-to-
us employment agreement as a condition of employment. This was many years ago
and I am still at the same company.

To counteract this, I only do contract work and work on fairly large team
collaborations. My thinking is if I don't own it but the client does (since
they are paying me to work on it after hours) - the day job company won't have
much to go on because I didn't own the code in the first place. For the second
- since I don't have full ownership/sole contributor - maybe that will make
them less likely to go after me than a clean cut single owner situation.

All of these projects are done on non-company time, network, and hardware. I
don't usually bring my MacBook in but when I have a client deadline, I will
work on my train commute and not even charge the MacBook using (company) power
- I tote around a second battery.

------
alanl
Yeah, I dont know, about this article. Although I have to say as a developer I
hope your right when you say the next decade will be mine.

TBH, I'll probably just keep doing what I'm really interested in to the best
of my ability and a decent pay check will follow.

~~~
tomjen3
I certainly hope so, because that's the plan I have for my life too (the
secret to happiness is not money, but being happy. That is also why people
don't, generally, become happy over the long term when they get a lot of
money). Here is to the assumption that it will work.

------
Swizec
Somehow I'm not so certain of this premise at its face value. While I do agree
that IT departments are going away and that people who make mobile/web apps
are about to rule the world.

But just consider what a JustWorks(tm) app really entails.

You certainly need a good designer with a firm grasp of UX design and making
everything very shiny.

You also most certainly need somebody who will market your app and make sure
it even finds those oh-so-independent office people.

And once your user-base grows to a number high enough to sustain your app at
all, you're going to have to handle them somehow ... because we all know
JustWorks(tm) means a few guys sweating in the background over the next dumb
thing somebody inputs where they weren't supposed to.

With that consideration in mind, it would seem we are entering the decade of
the scrappy startup.

------
muffinman2010
Please, lets not enter an age of programmers that act like kanye west. I
really hope programmers don't adopt this point of view, I go to an "ivy
league" cs uni, and I'm seeing my peers adopt this douchie ego - were they
think they control the world. I don't completely agree with this article its
taking a very startup / silicon valley approach to the whole argument, the
bigger the company gets the easier it becomes to afford more programmers, I
know it may be hard to believe but there are programmers outside silicon
valley, and most third world countries, india, china, Indonesia , Dubai have
ramped up their post secondary programs, every industry has its bubbles, cs is
now, a year ago it was accountants, its completly normal, doesn't mean we're
gonna rule the world.

