Right. Developers getting paid. You hear that sound? Listen real carefully. It's the sound of our profession being flushed down a toilet because your buddies are cheating businesses out of their money by charging too much for too little.
You say that, but consider what it takes to build a web site for an organisation like Four Seasons.
You’d probably spend 6 months alone on producing the various specifications and plans, and deal with governance (reviews and revisions, sign-off, acceptance and so on). You’d build out a proper information architecture (a little more than the average SharePoint TeamSite taxonomy).
To show you how realistic that number is, consider the scale of documentation Four Seasons would require you produce. Those docs would probably include, but not be limited to:
Project/team structure
Risk assessment
Vision/Scope
Business requirements
User requirements
System requirements
Operational requirements
Usage scenarios
Conceptual design
Logical design
Physical design
Availability plan
Backup and recovery plan
Budget plan
Capacity plan
Communications plan
Deployment plan
Development plan
End user support plan
Project plan
Project schedule
Pilot plan
Purchasing and facilities plan
Security plan
Support plan
Test plan
Training plan
And after all that you haven’t even written a line of code (other than the inevitable throw-away proofs of concept and demonstrators).
Imagine having to estimate the effort required to produce that set. The analysis alone will take a herd of business analysts months.
Like Steve Sinofsky said – new businesses (start-ups), or even new markets, simply cannot solve the class of problems that is addressed by larger and more established firms.
[Edit] That list up there excludes systems integration (hotel reservations, customer care, etc) and data migration - both of which can add orders of magnitude to a project.
Well, it's probably more like the company charging themselves too much by having a ridiculously mismanaged process for getting the work done.
Incoherent, produced-by-committee specs that don't actually have any explanation about how the soup of buttons and buzzwords is supposed to work, ridiculous management overhead.. it's probably not even the developers getting paid that much. Nobody walked off with that money, it was pissed away in 6-hour meetings.
To be frank, I always thought that our profession was being flushed down a toilet because some guys were cheating themselves by charging too little for too much. Go figure.
You've both made the classic fallacy of assuming that writing some code is all there is to do. For example, perhaps a lot of that money went on paying a photographer and his entourage to fly around the world.
We're talking about Four Seasons here. If this project cost $1m instead of $18m, I'm pretty confident that the other $17m would not be going into our profession.
Unless your metaphor is more about the legitimacy of our profession. If that is the case, I'd point out that we have no inside knowledge on the situation, and then I'd use Four Seasons as a counterpoint -- they charge crazy rates for a fancy hotel room, yet they're not destroying the hotel industry.
Right. And I suppose Mercedes is flushing the automobile manufacturing profession down the toilet because they're cheating customers by charging too much for too little as well?
