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0 pointsgame_the0ry5y ago0 comments

> Also, it's much more difficult to quantify the impact of a software engineer compared to investment bankers and consultants. The latter two are directly making money for the firm.

Yes, it is difficult, but possible.

Here's quick and dirty analysis - consider Sears, Walmart, and Amazon:

- Amazon pays its engineers near top of market - $1.5T market cap.

- Walmart has a pretty good engineering culture. They acquired a tech company to start Walmart Labs for data science stuff and they even have popular open source software (Hapi.js) - they're the largest company by revenue and $370B market cap.

- Ever been to Sears.com? Me neither - largest retailer in 1980 to bankrupt in 2018, stock price at $0.23 and $94M market cap.

I deduce that investment in software engineers == higher stock price.

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reaperducer5y ago

I deduce that investment in software engineers == higher stock price.

Easy to do when you cherry-pick three companies.

Run your analysis on 10,000 companies large and small and you might have something.

game_the0ryOP5y ago

> Easy to do when you cherry-pick three companies.

* Netflix vs Blockbuster

* Uber / Lyft vs taxi cabs

* Airbnb vs hotels

* Blogs vs print media

* Youtube /Instagram vs TV

* porn tube sites vs porn studios

I could keep going.

I've also tried the corollary - companies that are successful while cutting cost in tech, but I can't think of any successful companies that are cutting investment in tech.

WrtCdEvrydy5y ago

I wonder if we looked at stock price / developers.

Would it prove or disprove this statemenet?

Aunche5y ago

I meant quantifying an individual's impact. For i-banking that's easy. The more money an i-banker the raise, the better they are. There isn't a simple metric you can use for software engineering. Some terrible developers write a lot of code. Some amazing developers barely write any code.

Of course there is still meaningful signal you can use to differentiate developers, but it's going to be fuzzy. I-banking and consulting increase wages for their employees by firing everyone who doesn't meet a certain bar. In addition to creating a toxic work environment, this practice isn't possible with only fuzzy signals.

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