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?