Coding Sanity

I was chatting the other day to a friend of mine, one of the very few South African developers who I regard as better than myself - yeah, that ego's quite a thing huh? Anyway he was concerned that he was beginning to price himself out of the market. The main source of his concern came from such trends as outsourcing to India, automated tools and so on. I've been thinking about it, and while I don't agree that he should have to worry, the fact of the matter is that I think he does have to worry.

I don't know how many of you have read Steve McConnell's book Code Complete, but he has the results of an interesting study done some years back. Basically they took a whole bunch of developers with approximately the same experience and found up a 20 times productivity difference between them. That's right, some of the developers were 20 times more productive than others, with the same level of experience. Things like automated generation just allow the savvy developer to amplify their productivity.

So this is why I feel that he (and I) shouldn't have to worry. We're both passionate about development, and love what we do, we both keep current with new technologies, read development blogs, buy development books, and subscribe to development magazines. We code in our spare time for goodness sakes! Is there any doubt that we'd be better than some guy just in it as a standard career option? In fact one of the worries that both of us have is that our careers are pushing us towards more management kind of levels, and we would prefer to stay developers.

But the fact of the matter is that we do have to worry. The reason is quite simple, most managers (in South Africa at least) think about development teams primarily as a cost centre. Their concern is to rein in costs, not to boost productivity. Look at how leery many managers are about buying tools such as code generation or ORM tools. It's a short-sighted mentality, but a common one. Such a manager would be very unlikely to hire a very expensive senior developer, since they would not fully appreciate the benefits that such a hire could provide. I'm not just talking experience and productivity, I'm also talking mentoring, which I personally consider a major part of my job.

So what are our options? Do you guys think that it's possible to have a never-ending upwards career in development? Do we have to move to management in order to justify increases, despite the fact that we don't want to? Perhaps we could do a kind of Thinktecture thing where we get very senior devs to assist project teams in skilling up their staff both on the job and off it? Or is the only option that allows us to stay in development and earn bigger bucks to start our own product-focused company?

I don't know if the South African market is ready for a Thinktecture kind of beast. I doubt many teams would be happy with outside experts being brought in to skill them up, I think it'd raise too many hackles. The only long-term option as it seems to me is to start a product shop, but maybe I'm wrong. You tell me.