Forbes: The Rise of Developeronomics

[The Gorn]

However, the process of putting rocks into the barrel is like a basketball team is warming up. They have a lot of balls on the court at once and many people are shooting at the same time. So, many balls do not go into the basket. Similarly, many rocks get found, picked up, and tossed towards the barrel, but do not go in.

Why mention this? Because the process of picking up rocks and tossing them towards the barrel means a lot of employment for software developers. It is very, very important to realize that this is a temporary phase. Once the barrel does get filled with rocks, most of them will be on the outside looking for new employment.

Excellent. I completely agree with your analysis and extension of the metaphor.

Developer employment is the direct result of a period of churn and instability that follows a major shift of platform or re-invention of the tech landscape. It ends. The goal of businesses is not to keep well paid developers on their payroll indefinitely.

Periodically, there are new platforms that cause businesses to rethink how they are running their businesses and make new architectural demands on their IT. I think that we are seeing once of these new situations appearing, but it isn't social media. It is the demand by executives holding tablet computers for IT anywhere on any platform and the answer seems to be to go towards "cloud computing". I submit that this demand will be a stronger issue than social networking.

I'm not certain how mature the tablet/portable computer/cloud shift is at present but it seems to be well on its way.

Social media feels really old in many ways. We've had similar things for 20+ years but only now are the Proles waking up to finding and talking to people online. Twitter is just a crude web based text messaging service at its heart. Facebook is just a CMS that proles can easily tinker with.

[The Gorn]

Gorn,  my understanding of the article is that of somebody giving advice to business owners in the Information Age, to wit that all businesses will be information businesses, that developers will be the lifeblood of the business and here's how to hire and handle them.

The audience is strictly owners hiring software engineering labor.   The ideal worker in this guy's world is a young and talented software engineer who should be brought into the fold of the business and shrewdly kept there.   Talk about equity and ownership might have been mentioned at the end (can't remember, and I'm not looking at the article again) when he says that most software engineers eventually "get it" and either go out on their own or start asking for a bigger stake in the company  (at which point they probably get shown the door -- although the author would have owners be flexible with the 10x programmers).

I am not sure about your take on the target audience. Much of it reads like something that Joel Spolsky would write or would inspire. It's quite developer-centric and in fact a few actual developers posted comments to the comment stream.

It does feel like propaganda - but not just focused on business owners.

The guy is basically promoting the bubble around investment in non-real technology opportunities. His target could be inferred to be anyone who benefits from the bubble - programmers, VCs, anyone supplying services to the sector.

The guy is delusional and has no experience in business or reality. One example from the first page:

In the midst of a thoroughly gloomy labor market, the genuine desperation you see in the software talent wars is almost surreal. Almost every day, I see big companies, little companies, entrepreneurs, wannabe entrepreneurs and even venture capitalists join in the hunt. The talent hunters infest LinkedIn, troll Quora, and trawl Facebook and Google+. Cartoons of homeless-looking CEOs holding up signs that say “Looking for a technical co-founder” are doing the rounds. Heck, I am one of these talent hunters (any star iOS developers out there interested in working with me?).

I bolded the last bit because it shows his naivete' clearly. He considers himself a "talent hunter" even though in all likelihood he is offering nothing but a sweat equity share in a worthless iPhone application.

He's NOT an employer and he is confusing economic opportunity with a part time two bit marginal activity that you engage in if you're unemployed.