And we're off...

Yesterday was my last day at Fuel. It was a hard decision, but one I felt was necessary in order to grow.

I'm heading back into more enterprise-type of work. I'll essentially be building management systems and services for emergency-room medical equipment. Our teams portion of the work isn't as critical as the medical devices themselves, but there's still an extremely high need for quality.

From my observations, our field suffers badly from high turnover. Part of that is the economic flux in software development - I think most companies are still grappling to figure out how much a software developer is actually worth to them with respect to an open market. A major problem is how deceivingly simple it is to write software - but how difficult it is to write good software. A young company can start off hiring a group of junior developers at $40K (the going rate in Ottawa as far as I can tell), but as soon as jobs starts to get bigger and expectations greater, they seem unable to make that jump to $80K. We can get 2 programmers for that price - they reason. Of course, as has been shown numerous times before (don't managers read these things?!), top programmers are unbelievably cheap with respect to productivity.

We generally learn from our failures and success, and by being exposed to a variety of programs and fellow programmers. Stay at one place for too long, and you get really good at doing one thing, but opportunities to learn become few and far apart. I think good developers start to thirst for failure - or at least the risk of failure. I'm not taking about the failure that comes from an unreasonable deadline either, but from true problem solving.

Which of course leads to another big reason I see developers leaving their jobs - they want to do things differently. The most drastic example is the move to Agile methodologies. It's easy to get caught up in the Agile-hype - in large part because a lot of it is common sense - but the reality is that most companies aren't ready or capable of doing such huge transition. It's far easier to change companies than to try to change a company.

I think all of these problems can be summed up by companies not understanding software development or developers. Some companies don't even realize they are in the software business...yikes!

People often say the grass is greener on the other side. But sometimes it really is greener on the other side. I guess we'll soon find out.

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