Tell that to Microsoft. They sat stagnant on WinMo 6.x for nearly 5 years before rewriting and releasing Windows Phone 7.
That highlights my point. Until the competition arrived, there was no real force driving them to continue working on it. The money was rolling in regardless of what they were doing to it. Microsoft could have went down to the unemployment line and set all of those people to work on the product, but unlike in other industries, there was no reason for that to happen.
The reason why programmers make upwards of 200k/yr. (depending on region and specialization) is because there's not enough of them
Again highlighting my point. Farmers have to hire anyone, not because farming is easy, but because you can't wait to find a great farmhand. The job has to be done now. Tech companies can wait for the best of the best. Why aren't those software companies hiring that guy who lost his manufacturing job for $9/hr instead? It is because they don't need to. They can wait for the one who is great at the job.
"Tech companies can wait for the best of the best. Why aren't those software companies hiring that guy who lost his manufacturing job for $9/hr instead? It is because they don't need to. They can wait for the one who is great at the job."
That's not true at all.
A crappy farm hand might harvest at 1/2 or 1/3 the rate of a great one.
A crappy developer will actively damage a project.
It is simply not possible to increase software development productivity by hiring lots of people who don't know what they're doing.
A crappy developer will actively damage a project.
A bad farmhand will damage equipment worth far more than most pieces of software, destroy crops and animals, the list goes on and on. I can say from experience in both that farming is significantly more challenging than programming.
Even a small farmer will have several millions of dollars worth of equipment that is easily broken in the wrong hands. Like good programmers, good farmhands can be paid quite well because they bring a lot of value to the business.
If a bad programmer gets into your codebase, it is trivial to revert their work. It is much less trivial to replace a $500,000 combine because of an minor operator mistake.
I think there's a big difference between $5-15/hr illegals used to pick crops seasonally by hand, vs. basically apprentice/permanent party farmhands who would touch a $500k+ piece of machinery.
It's pretty easy to evaluate the work product of a fruit picker in a field, compared to a "knowledge worker".
That highlights my point. Until the competition arrived, there was no real force driving them to continue working on it. The money was rolling in regardless of what they were doing to it. Microsoft could have went down to the unemployment line and set all of those people to work on the product, but unlike in other industries, there was no reason for that to happen.
The reason why programmers make upwards of 200k/yr. (depending on region and specialization) is because there's not enough of them
Again highlighting my point. Farmers have to hire anyone, not because farming is easy, but because you can't wait to find a great farmhand. The job has to be done now. Tech companies can wait for the best of the best. Why aren't those software companies hiring that guy who lost his manufacturing job for $9/hr instead? It is because they don't need to. They can wait for the one who is great at the job.