IT Meritocracy. Part 10: What B2B Software Is Worth $400K Wages?
TPS reports are most certainly not. IT bosses have insisted for decades, that programming is an Accounts Receivable kind of commodity, at least outside a handful of “scientific” Googles of the industry. Is it? Do we, enterprise software devs, build anything better, than TPS reports? Products that deserve Google Level 6 compensation.
A better question is, if what we are tasked with (and paid accordingly) at our day jobs is what the real customers need. The money ultimately comes from them, not your boss. So… if your job was perfect, what would you build to challenge the “big tech” (Google, Amazon, and the likes) with your programming ingenuity?
Here we are: wondering if the effort to solve a non-trivial paying customer’s problem, will ever translate into wages comparable with the B2C industry, offering “free” blog platforms, messengers, and games to make money on ads.
Do you, a software engineer, believe in mysterious Google’s and Facebook’s “science” of the AI or another kind? Even if it exists, how many of their employees are 100% scientists? Vs. coders.
The “big tech” relies on quality programming, that has nothing to do with their academic bias and infamous “algorithmic” interviews. What about you? You can argue with your manager, that your code is as clever, entitling you to Google’s $400K wages, but at at the end of the day it’s economics.
How much money you bring (or save) your employer? Are unique targeted B2B products and services worth as much, as ubiquitous “free” B2C stuff marketed to the masses and then used as ad vehicles to sell somebody else’s marketing: either pushing ads right there or collecting marketing data to push them somewhere else? Is any software about its features: things the user specifically requested and wants to pay for, or no features matter and everything is about marketing?
I respect both schools of thought: marketing some “free” commodity used to sell ads, and selling unique well-engineered products — to unthinkable for marketers 1000x narrower demographics, albeit at a much higher price.
In my world, a struggling “midsize” software shop: The Office Space’s Initech the industry is full of, is worth a lot more, than some pretty Snapchat wannabe. Because every “Initech” has paying customers.
I know, nothing’s really “free”, but since those blogs, messengers and other non-essential entertainment apps and mobile gadgets have almost identical sets of features and don’t stand out on their own, popular at a given moment solely due to the hype/marketing, your expert programming skills are not needed at all. Someone else can out-market the current reigning king to the lowest common denominator demographics.
Cheap “Initechs”, dysfunctional outsourced IT departments, and the wasteful Great IT Consulting Food Chain portray the current pathetic state of the enterprise software industry, stagnated for nearly 20 years since the Y2K “aversion”. Does their ugliness automatically invalidate the market? Is gathering enormous user bases of unsuspecting teenagers and other easy to attract demographics to sell to advertisers is always more profitable, than putting an effort into a unique mission-critical product/service for 1000x fewer users (businesses)?
There are businesses and then there are businesses, right?
Major hospitals pay a couple of billions every year for their EMRs. Yes, you read it right: billions. Being a nobody, you won’t get into that “enterprise sales” world with just your brainpower. You won’t sell your brain to Silicon Valley VCs either. They don’t need you, scheming with their “serial entrepreneur” buddies.
Any newcomer’s market is below Oracle and Salesforce clients. Not that the IT Consulting Food Chain led by Oracle delivers what its customers need in the 21st century. It’s a technology issue. Everyone in the Consulting Food Chain struggles, though paid by the hour, 70–90% failures are no longer a concern for them.
Don’t be fixated on Initechs’ ugliness. Slotted below Oracle, they present an opportunity: a technical problem to solve. Can you retire them? All by yourself — by automating your work. Then grow and retire Oracle. Why not? Worth $400K compensation? For delivering products bigger than freelancer websites and Zoho’s form-filling app, expected from a single programmer with conventional technology.
B2B vs. B2C.
Why quality engineering pays $400K at Google, but not in IT? Size- and complexity-wise a comprehensive accounting ERP or hospital EMR is comparable to the entire Facebook UI, plus probably most of its supposedly AI analytics. Or half of Android. So why senior ERP developers are paid 1/3rd of Google L6 compensation? Lower budgets — compared to the “big tech” rolling in advertiser cash? Not really. ERPs range from $10M to $100M. Hospitals pay billions to EMR vendors.
The only difference — with Google, is the success rate. Googlers set the goal, plan, and meticulously execute — through quality programming. While the corporate IT copes with 70–90% failures of mediocre work performed by 100x bigger teams of code monkeys.
Is that a chicken and egg issue? IT would love to solve all its problems e.g. finally get rid of 1970s mainframe, propped up to live past Y2K. But all good engineers went to Google and became… “unaffordable”?
CFO greed is a problem. Though hardly the root cause of the 20-year technology stagnation. Imagine Oracle or Deloitte hiring a Level 6 Googler as a consultant. What would he/she do at some bank’s IT department? I mean the actual programming to make the difference, since the typical ex-Googler’s specialty nowadays is brandishing his/her credentials in a nominal CTO or nominal Chief Architect role. Other than that, what’d a senior ex-Googler work on? “Architecture blueprints”? “Integrating” IBM “middleware” with Oracle’s via nightly database dumps?
There is no place for Googlers in IT, just like there is no place for any skilled developer. No technology there anymore to require, let alone benefit from good programming skills.
Uncomfortable around smart engineers, IT bosses have been trying to eradicate “expensive” programming for decades: through mythical DIY tools, no end user wanted to touch, and “almost-turnkey” packages, that required hundreds of consultants (and millions of dollars) to “tweak” and “integrate”. Finally, when that didn’t work, they “outsourced” programming out of sight and simply stopped developing new systems, coming to terms with their impotence to “build” (vs. “buy”).
Nothing new has been produced in IT (including top-tier vendors like 1999 Salesforce and 1980s Oracle) after our bosses learned they could get away with propping up old (Y2K) crap to outlive its end of life. The maintenance of the existing software was dumbed down to amateur zip-tying and duct-taping performed by hordes of third-world code monkeys. Guess, tired of arguing with us (about the raises), our bosses went and did turn programming into a commodity —thankfully only in the field they control: enterprise software.
Sure, CFOs can sleep better knowing engineers became less “expensive”. How much that dumbed down commodity really saved? IT spends more than ever on rework and in middleman markups alone, though if the goal was to pay the engineers less to put them in their place in the corporate hierarchy, I rest my case.
How much commodity engineering helps IT departments? It will keep the propped up 1970s mainframe crap and circa-2002 Java spaghetti alive for another 10 years, until the real Y2K crisis happens, when bank, insurance, and hospital software crashes and burns under the mountains of bugs that require more and more code monkeys every day, since an amateur introduces five by fixing one. No one is concerned, charging by the hour, while corporate decision makers keep using IT departments as money sinks to hedge against taxes, and the Silicon Valley plays its exit games without the need for working products that sell.
What that mess means? Yes, an opportunity. Unfortunately not an employment one. You don’t want to work for an Initech, other than to learn about its niche. It is an entrepreneurial opportunity. Best of all — a 100% engineering one. You don’t need to be an ML or another “scientist”. Just do your job well.
Backdropped by the toxic IT wasteland, your work shines by simply being normal quality programming.
No mad scientists. No dignified “architects”. No charismatic business “visionaries” or their Stanford-Harvard buddies: investors. 21st century enterprise automation needs programming experts.
Everything is About Technology.
Google didn’t start paying its current wages until 2010s. Mesmerized by $400K, many have forgotten, that Google paid the same, as outsourced IT during its first 15 years.
Did it take Google that long to build its fortune? Until the “quarterly earnings” got so obnoxiously high, the Wall Street appointed board allowed the two geek saviors: Larry and Sergey to do the unthinkable — pay engineers 3x the industry average? No. It took Google 15 years to build its technology, which became so advanced, only the select few could work on it — making things even more advanced.
Current Google wages reflect the supply and demand situation. Not across the industry. Within their specific niche. Whether you agree with Google’s hiring criteria or not, it is the demand for specific skills, needed for advanced Google projects; The classic rule in action: fewer programmers doing and earning more.
The normal way of technical progress, if you ask me.
It’d have been funny, if it wasn’t so sad, how the B2B world chose the opposite strategy: to dumb down engineering, so it could hire amateurs and pay less. The classic reversal of technical progress, which has always aimed to solve the shortage of manual labor. Find an excess of that labor — in the certain overpopulated part of the world, and the progress is not needed anymore.
How else could the wage suppression happen? Did the greedy CFOs get together and conspired to manipulate the supply and demand via some kind of “wage-fixing”? It is the technology and nothing else.
Your wages are not restricted by where you live. You can network and connect with Western clients directly in our age of social networks. Or make a good living by automating untapped local market, since everyone wants to work for a “rich” Western corporation.
Greedy bosses and politicians capping your wages? You can change employers. It is what you do, that defines your pay. With virtually no equipment costs to depend on work environment provided to you by the man, the “what” (technology) is up to you. It’s a 100% technical problem.
A $100M Oracle ERP is comparable to Android OS scope-wise. Does it make anything prehistoric like that worthy $400K annual wages for senior ERP developers? Absolutely not. It implores us, inferior enterprise devs who can’t pass algorithmic interviews at Goggle and Amazon, to build our own advanced technology worthy of $400K compensation.
There was nothing before Google in the B2C space. They, and a few others took it upon themselves to build their own geek-centric world, financed by the next generation technology. Since unacademic and unscientific business software development is not welcome there, or at Sequoia and Accel, we have no choice, but to build or own engineer heaven: company by company.
Don’t let Google’s and Facebook’s current “scientific” bias fool you. They haven’t always been like that. They started as normal engineering companies. Still are. CalTech and MIT PhDs didn’t build the “big tech”. It was everyday engineering ingenuity: little inventions the select few come up with at our corporate jobs too — taken for granted by our semi-technical (at best) bosses.
Forget them. There are other ways to monetize your everyday ingenuity, than working for the man.
The stagnated for 20 years enterprise software industry needs you more than ever. I mean the customers. They need 21st century accounting ERPs and hospital EMRs, based on the latest Amazon, Google, Facebook, and the rest of the open source tech — instead of 40y.o. Oracle’s or 20 y.o. Salesforce’s.
How about finally delivering something that should have replaced the mainframe aka “legacy” systems before the Y2K deadline? To be fair, both Googles of the industry and the open-source movement were in their infancy back then. 20 years after, one can and actually must develop robust and beautiful business software w/o a single piece of IBM, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, or Microsoft code.
