King David and His Java
From Joel, linked by Martin:
Several years ago a larger company was considering buying out Fog Creek, and I knew it would never work as soon as I heard the CEO of that company say that he didn't really agree with my theory of hiring the best programmers. He used a biblical metaphor: you only need one King David, and an army of soldiers who merely had to be able to carry out orders. His company's stock price promptly dropped from 20 to 5, so it's a good thing we didn't take the offer, but it's hard to pin that on the King David fetish....
In some other industries, cheap is more important than good. Wal*Mart grew to be the biggest corporation on Earth by selling cheap products, not good products. If Wal*Mart tried to sell high quality goods, their costs would go up and their whole cheap advantage would be lost....
So, why isn't there room in the software industry for a low cost provider, someone who uses the cheapest programmers available? (Remind me to ask Quark how that whole fire-everybody-and-hire-low-cost-replacements plan is working.)
Here's why: duplication of software is free. That means that the cost of programmers is spread out over all the copies of the software you sell. With software, you can improve quality without adding to the incremental cost of each unit sold.
Essentially, design adds value faster than it adds cost.
Or, roughly speaking, if you try to skimp on programmers, you'll make crappy software, and you won't even save that much money....
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