I am a PC fan and I am beginning to feel as I did when I was a University of Michigan fan living in Ohio. PCs (and their users) are ridiculed on commercials, in news stories, by random people on the internet, in some tech blogs, and even from the pulpit.
As a caveat, I have never purchased a Mac product but I was given an iPad by my work and I like it, but it is not without its flaws not the least of which is that its screen is glass and broke this past weekend for unknown reasons leaving shards of glass in my bed.
Anyway, there is a quote, attributed to Mohandas Ghandi, that I am going to paraphrase:
Apple: I like your Products, I do not like your Users. Your Users are so unlike your Products.
What I mean by this is that the products are elegant, graceful, blend into the scenery, make life easier, and are generally unobtrusive and well designed. Mac users are, in my general view, very proud of the fact they own an Apple product and view it not so much as an addendum to their life but as an extension of their personality. This is a gross generalization and I am aware of this but this is what Apple marketing has sold and what their users have, to a certain extent, bought into.
With that said, I have a very good friend who works at the Apple store and he is, bar none, the best ambassador for Apple on the face of the planet. He has never attacked my usage of PCs, he knows that I like a product because it does what I want it to do. He likes Apple for the same reason. What he wants to do, he can do with an Apple product. When I had frustrations with Apple products, he showed me ways to work around the limitations (and yes, there are limitations). I bashed his use of Apple a few times but his grace and love extended to me changed the way I viewed Apple products. He called me out and I respect him for it.
What I'm trying to say is this: If you like Apple, by all means, let people know how awesome the technology is. However, technological awesomeness is not a zero sum game. Technology is about making life easier, taking tasks that used to take months and finishing them in hours. The next time you hear someone bashing something, be it a piece of technology, political stances, sexual proclivities, taste in music, or etc remember: by invalidating the thing that they care about you are, in effect, invalidating a part of them. You will lose their respect and possibly their friendship.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
Developer VORP
There's a CIO in the Valley who is making waves around the internet with his article entitiled "Why we don’t hire .NET programmers" The community of software developers is split over this trolling. I see his logic, and here's why.
There is an excellent TED talk about the question of work life balance. In it the presenter makes what I believe to be a valid point: Even the best companies want us to work as much as possible for as little money as possible. A person is an investment, if you invest in someone, you're assuming the equation:
value of work produced > cost of keeping the person
Playing fantasy baseball, this was the only equation I looked at. Is their immediate value, or supposed value to me, worth what I'm "paying" for them with this roster spot. There's even an equation to help teams or fantasy players figure this out.
Now we get to the question at hand: Why is .NET on a resume an indicator that VC firms should not hire this person? Unlike most companies, VC firms need to produce results, fast. They can't rely on grooming developers, training and teaching them how to write good code or solve problems. They need these results as cheap as possible. Where can you get these results? From people who would, and do, write software for free. Basically from people who are just looking for a cool challenge and not a job, per se. VCs looking for people who's VORP is as high as possible. People who will do challenging work for much less than they are worth or for many more hours than they are paid for because it is challenging.
The .NET framework is a market value skill much like strikeouts or home runs are market value skills in baseball. There are enough .NET developers that the bad ones are easy to find and the good ones know what they're worth so they demand a higher salary. People without a market value skill cannot. The price value of a Ruby developer is not defined by the market...yet.
To prove my point, let's look at a very mature technology vs a relatively new one
C# Dev: Average $76,000
http://www.simplyhired.com/a/salary/search/q-c%23+developer
Rails Dev: Average $70,000
http://www.simplyhired.com/a/salary/search/q-rails+developer
One would assume that a Rails developer is worth more than a C# developer; however, this is not the case and the reason why is fairly self explanatory but I'll jump to football for this one. The Patriots have a receiver named Wes Welker. He's fast, pretty solid, but not what you'd call a stereotypical receiver. However, the Patriots went out and got him, figured out his talents and won with him. Now every time you watch a football game they talk about this guy being "like Wes Welker" meaning he fills a role much like Welker did for the Patriots. All of the sudden guys like Welker are demanding much more than they did a few years ago because the industry has recognized their value. The same is true of .NET developers.
So one reason VCs look for non-.NET developers because their skills are unvalued in the larger marketplace. The other reason is that non-.NET developers are more likely to be good.
There are a lot of really crappy .NET developers out there (and I think we can all agree on this). People who have faked their way into a technology scraping by on the skin of their teeth and the skill of their coworkers. Eliminating .NET developers eliminates these developers from the fray. Anything to get you closer to the ideal candidate for a VC: cheap and smart. So I can't fault the guy for wanting to eliminate candidates as fast as possible. If .NET is a culling mechanism, then by all means use it.
On the other side of that coin, there are developers who are willing to work long hours for low(ish) pay simply because they are working on cool stuff. They have no idea what their skills are actually worth. If they did, they would demand $200,000 or more. No VC in their right mind would pay two hundred grand for a developer. Maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe Expensify pays their developers $150 an hour with time and a half for overtime. But I doubt it, it's a good way to lose money. And why do that when you can find people who don't know how much they should be paid and just want to do cool stuff?
There is an excellent TED talk about the question of work life balance. In it the presenter makes what I believe to be a valid point: Even the best companies want us to work as much as possible for as little money as possible. A person is an investment, if you invest in someone, you're assuming the equation:
value of work produced > cost of keeping the person
Playing fantasy baseball, this was the only equation I looked at. Is their immediate value, or supposed value to me, worth what I'm "paying" for them with this roster spot. There's even an equation to help teams or fantasy players figure this out.
Now we get to the question at hand: Why is .NET on a resume an indicator that VC firms should not hire this person? Unlike most companies, VC firms need to produce results, fast. They can't rely on grooming developers, training and teaching them how to write good code or solve problems. They need these results as cheap as possible. Where can you get these results? From people who would, and do, write software for free. Basically from people who are just looking for a cool challenge and not a job, per se. VCs looking for people who's VORP is as high as possible. People who will do challenging work for much less than they are worth or for many more hours than they are paid for because it is challenging.
The .NET framework is a market value skill much like strikeouts or home runs are market value skills in baseball. There are enough .NET developers that the bad ones are easy to find and the good ones know what they're worth so they demand a higher salary. People without a market value skill cannot. The price value of a Ruby developer is not defined by the market...yet.
To prove my point, let's look at a very mature technology vs a relatively new one
C# Dev: Average $76,000
http://www.simplyhired.com/a/salary/search/q-c%23+developer
Rails Dev: Average $70,000
http://www.simplyhired.com/a/salary/search/q-rails+developer
One would assume that a Rails developer is worth more than a C# developer; however, this is not the case and the reason why is fairly self explanatory but I'll jump to football for this one. The Patriots have a receiver named Wes Welker. He's fast, pretty solid, but not what you'd call a stereotypical receiver. However, the Patriots went out and got him, figured out his talents and won with him. Now every time you watch a football game they talk about this guy being "like Wes Welker" meaning he fills a role much like Welker did for the Patriots. All of the sudden guys like Welker are demanding much more than they did a few years ago because the industry has recognized their value. The same is true of .NET developers.
So one reason VCs look for non-.NET developers because their skills are unvalued in the larger marketplace. The other reason is that non-.NET developers are more likely to be good.
There are a lot of really crappy .NET developers out there (and I think we can all agree on this). People who have faked their way into a technology scraping by on the skin of their teeth and the skill of their coworkers. Eliminating .NET developers eliminates these developers from the fray. Anything to get you closer to the ideal candidate for a VC: cheap and smart. So I can't fault the guy for wanting to eliminate candidates as fast as possible. If .NET is a culling mechanism, then by all means use it.
On the other side of that coin, there are developers who are willing to work long hours for low(ish) pay simply because they are working on cool stuff. They have no idea what their skills are actually worth. If they did, they would demand $200,000 or more. No VC in their right mind would pay two hundred grand for a developer. Maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe Expensify pays their developers $150 an hour with time and a half for overtime. But I doubt it, it's a good way to lose money. And why do that when you can find people who don't know how much they should be paid and just want to do cool stuff?
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