[jrockway]

I can kind of see this for GE, because it isn't a software company. But Oracle does nothing but make software -- programmers are the absolute most important people on their projects.

Oh yeah, I forgot. Oracle is a marketing company. If you want a nice database, use Postgres. If you want a database that sponsors a sailboat, buy Oracle.

[CamperBob]

I can kind of see this for GE, because it isn't a software company.

Every large company is a software company, whether they know it or not. Failure to provide a career path for software engineering professionals on the technical side of the fence is a poor strategy, period.

[jrockway]

Oh, I agree 100%. The software industry barely understands software (see also: offshoring), so I simply don't expect a non-software company to even be in the ballpark.

Big companies assume software projects will be failures, and treat their employees accordingly. Then they get what they expect.

(Hire a bunch of good programmers with good management, and you can get amazingly reliable software from a team of two. Hire a bunch of bad programmers, though, and a team of 100 produces something worse than most kids' intro-to-java app. But nobody but the best programmers understand this, and it looks better to the business to pay 10 people each $60,000 a year instead of paying 2 people $200,000 a year. When a big company "gets this", their software becomes a lot better.)

[docgnome]

It's obvious that a small group of great programmers beats a large group of bad ones. This is pointed out constantly on HN and in other programming communities. I'm curious though if anyone has any hard data to support this, beyond anecdotal evidence. (I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment, I agree completely. I'm just interested in seeing any studies done on the subject. I imagine this applies to many other fields as well.)

[gaius]

It's obvious that a small group of great programmers beats a large group of bad ones

The question is, tho', "at what"? Oracle's product offering is VAST. And most of it is technically quite simple; it just does an awful lot. You can't use clever Lisp macros to do stuff like this: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyIsPayrollHard You just have to chuck people at it.

[tamersalama]

Data are hard to come by in the industry (compared to, say, manufacturing where science branches were spawned based on analysis, observations).

From where I stand, the cost of poor quality software goes beyond the production. It's more in maintenance, licensing, lost opportunities, and poor adaptability to changing business needs.

[docgnome]

Right. Which is why we need a long term study. To follow a product from conception to production to end of life.

[_delirium]

Not just software-engineering, either; a lot of large engineering companies don't provide much of an engineering career path that doesn't involve being promoted into management. For almost the entire time my dad was at Amoco (later bought by BP), for a few decades, they were discussing implementing a technical career path with some sort of high-level engineering rank, but it somehow never happened. So the top engineers either languished at "senior engineer" (a reasonably high rank, but basically a ~15 years of experience rank, not equivalent to something like IBM Fellow), or else jumped to management, or left to do consulting. One predictable result was a lot of middle managers who were neither good at nor particularly excited about management, and a lack of senior engineers, in particular engineers in the 3rd phase of a project who had actually worked on the 1st and 2nd phases.

[chime]

GE actually writes a lot of software, especially industrial applications. Their software division is bigger than most software-only companies: http://www.ge.com/products_services/software_services.html

[ghjklkjh]

Worse here in the frozen North.

I can't be a senior engineer because developers can't be engineers at all - and only engineers are allowed to supervise staff.

So Gosling's boss would be a 21 engineer-in-training.

[earl]

I don't think it's necessarily a career path, or lack thereof, but the companies' perspective on software: I left biotech because the companies I worked for, and it seemed to be an industry problem, viewed software not as their differentiator or edge or product, but rather purely as a cost center to be minimized. From that distinction, everything flows.

[tsotha]

I had the same problem at a mutual fund company, which is funny when you think about it. What is financial services company but a group of people that manages information?

[gaius]

This is why Goldman Sachs has weathered the financial crisis so well: they invest heavily in their IT.