[HourglassFR]

Maybe when developer productivity measurment becomes standard accross the industry we will realise that tech workers are in fact workers. Cogs in a machine. And not independant individuals imposing their will to the world through sheer will like some Randian hero. Maybe then it will then be plainly evident that developers are as alienated as any service worker, and in the end as disposable in the eyes of the shareholders.

Will we then organize with other workers to create better working conditions for everyone or will there be fewer and fewer developers working with ever more powerful technology chasing richer than ever VCs?

[908B64B197]

> as disposable in the eyes of the shareholders.

If a company is willing to sacrifice engineering talent and institutional knowledge for short term gains... Good luck staying in business.

Reference: Every outsourcing project I've seen.

[rusticpenn]

They are called Best cost countries now.

[yourapostasy]

> Maybe when developer productivity measurment becomes standard accross the industry...

I suggest you look to database models/schemas standardization for an indication of how close this is coming to fruition. I personally can't measure developer productivity at a fine-grained level until requirements are stabilized, and I personally cannot stabilize requirements unless the domain is so well known the data store is standardized. I had hoped SAP would lead the charge through empirically iterating towards standards, but they left out the huge small and mid-size business markets with what they use today. And what they use today is still far from industries' standards.

We're no closer to standardization than when I started in software decades ago. We don't even have standard means of storing, transforming, displaying and tracking metadata upon calendars, addresses, phone numbers, names, and lots of other ephemera I can rattle off, within a single stakeholder industry, not to speak of within the software industry in general. There have certainly been efforts to standardize like Silverston's, but they haven't caught traction.

I'd sure like to see that happen, because it would short-circuit a lot of the discussions I engage with stakeholders to only the site-specific requirements, where I really add business value. Instead, I have to derive the data model from intricate discussion of their requirements, since they themselves have not agreed upon the parts that are common across their respective industries, so I end up at the start of dicussions with all sorts of little twisty pieces of a data model, all alike.