Home → 2006/04/11, 14h47
Been there, done that
Joel Spolsky has hit the nail right in with this entertaining essay entitled The Development Abstraction Layer
Explaining how important activities such as administration, IT, graphic design, marketing, sales, and support are important in a company, Joel writes that
[these activities] in a typical company, add up to about 80% of the payroll. It is not a coincidence that the Roman army had a ratio of four servants for every soldier. This was not decadence. Modern armies probably run 7:1. (Here's something Pradeep Singh taught me today: if only 20% of your staff is programmers, and you can save 50% on salary by outsourcing programmers to India, well, how much of a competitive advantage are you really going to get out of that 10% savings?)
This calculation does not consider that some of those activities may as well be outsourced to India but nonetheless, considering these numbers, the India advantage may not be such a big benefit for American companies (American referring to all coutries in America, the continent... including Canada, the United States, Mexico, and so on ... ;)
But the part I find most amusing is this one:
On the other extreme you have typical software companies built by ex-programmers. These companies are harder to find because in most circumstances they keep quietly to themselves, polishing code in a garret somewhere, which nobody ever finds, and so they fade quietly into oblivion right after the Great Ruby Rewrite, their earth-changing refactoring-code code somehow unappreciated by The People.
Been there, done that... I hate this sentence. But it is so tempting to go there again, do it again...
