Comment by Bokanovsky
7 years ago
This is a classic example of a Veblen good [1].
"Veblen goods are types of luxury goods for which the quantity demanded increases as the price increases, an apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. Some goods become more desirable because of their high prices."
The suits are expensive, so they must be good. It's also a status signal to others that you can afford such goods. (Edit minor typo).
As the Director of Technology at a non-profit organization, how am I supposed to staff software engineering resources when these pricing practices like these are commonplace in the for-profit world? How am I supposed to make an argument to the board that a single technology staff member, let alone a working team, is 5x-10x more valuable than the rest of the workforce? I'm going to admit it - it's hard to see stuff like this and not be extremely frustrated. Tech is already one of the largest cost centers in an enterprise, and it's proving to be nearly impossible to find any tech staff willing to work for, admittedly, crumbs.
Don't compete on the price then. Compete on something else, like the working conditions.
The author describes how they had to drive 50 miles every day, use the corporate laptop (or install shady software on their own one), not get a response for many days. Basically, their rate (and the total cost) covers not just the work they do, but all the frustration that comes with the work.
Now, if you treat your staff better than that — remove all the hurdles, answer their emails promptly etc. — then there will be many talented people who'd prefer it over a meaningless-but-highly-paid alternative.
If your tech function is being judged by cost, rather than value, you're always going to have problems.
Have you heard of freecodecamp? The idea is for non-profits to work with currently self-teaching devs.
Non-profits get free labor and the devs get real world experience.
Have you considered training internal people to do what you need?
> it's hard to see stuff like this and not be extremely frustrated.
I guess you are frustrated because your company doesn't make much money on technology. If the company has a positive ROI on tech, then you wouldn't be frustrated, because more you invest, more you get out. Most companies doesn't need made-to-measure technology solutions.
As a freelance dev I've worked with a ngo where they paid me to get their junior to create an application. Then another. Then later just to help him with some new concept. I'm not freelance any more (yet) but if you just wanna chat about it, I'd be happy to relay my experience.
My sister works for a non-profit, and we've discussed tech projects there a few times. I think the issue from a business perspective is on the demand side of things. The problem is that the market rate is set by the companies that are in a position to pay it. Everyone else has no say, they're just shut out. You're competing for staff with startups and enterprises that are capturing enormous value.
There's no easy solution, in market terms at least. Maybe you get lucky and catch someone who doesn't need the money and thinks your cause is good enough to put effort towards, but that's not reliable. I wish I had a better answer. Upskilling someone else is potentially viable, depending on what exactly you need. The problem is that things such as static sites and basic sysadmin stuff that are (relatively) easy to skill up in, are also quite cheap in the marketplace for that exact reason. So I'm guessing that's not exactly what you're talking about.
There's quite a bit of effort these days towards upskilling people into more web app developer roles. Lots of bootcamp graduates and a few self taughts floating around. And in my last hiring exercise I found there's quite a large pool (in my area, ymmv) of devs looking for their first real FE/BE job. There's probably some real good value there but the trick is in sifting through the mud. The quality varies wildly, and some of it is shocking. You could get lucky though. I think the go is university graduates, but I hear a lot about grads in the US going straight into high-ish paying jobs so that may be area-specific advice. I was on $45k my first job out, which I thought was fair at the time. But now that I understand the market better and can see just how sub-par a lot of the work out there is, it's obvious that that was a bargain.
The other problem with that is that you're at a big disadvantage when building a team from scratch. A lot of the new devs coming in that will accept lower wages will turn out to be great coders and deliver great value, but a much smaller subset is going to be able to do that on their own with no guidance. That's part of the reason I suggest looking for graduates. I know it's an unpopular opinion here but I think a strong theoretical understanding of software development will help a self-starter more than the equivalent practical knowledge, since without a lot of mentorship they're going to get much more of the practical side from working for you. My first job was straight in the deep end, full responsibility for everything and very little help (one back-end dev who was in the same position with only a tiny bit more experience). I'm super greatful for it, and I think it made me a far better dev than I would have been if I went with a different (bigger) company. Maybe that could be a selling point?
tl;dr if you can't compete with the market then you need an edge that gives you more value than you'd otherwise get. That means people that aren't in it for the money (needle in a haystack, as I'm sure you know, given your position), and people that will rapidly (and successfully) upskill above what the market expects.
Maybe, but not necessarily.
When I price out eg contractors, I know roughly what a senior SE should cost. Where I live, that's $150/hour.
If you come in at $75, I don't assume you're a bargain. I assume there's something wrong with you. Either you're not good, or are just starting out, or whatever the case may be.
In this case, just like I bet the tailor, the point isn't paying more for status. The point is that a service should cost X, so someone going way under cost worries the buyer.
For anyone interested, I highly recommend _Theory of the Leisure Class_, in which Veblen developed the notion:
http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/LCS/theoryleisureclass.pdf
It's worth asking if most of what society is doing is prestige-seeking?
Conspicuous consumption is undeniable when looking at some goods and services, but what about the ordinary, say university?
University is definitely a prestige good. Most people don’t go into the profession they trained in. Lots of people studied something there are either no jobs in or they never even intended to practice professionally. Most people forget most of every university class they ever took. People care enormously about the prestige of university attended even though what’s covered in an engineering or literature degree at Harvard and Directional State U will have huge overlap. Finally, look at credentialism; people need Master's to get jobs that used to require a. Bachelor’s and a Bachelor’s for ones that used to require a Master’s. The Case Against Education, Bryan Caplan, has much more but education is absolutely a positional good. People don’t just want it. They want to have more than other people do so that in a legible ranking they’re superior.
Conspicuous consumption and its ilk have a very poor status in sociology. Thus far, wealth inequality and displays of it are the only things actually shown, when all societies are considered, to always increase violent crime. Even poverty has no effect except in situations where it is juxtaposed with wealth. There, it irresistibly tends to violence. (Source: 'Nine Crazy Ideas in Science', chapter 1, which was actually about gun ownership rates and violent crime levels but which mentioned the finding about wealth inequality after dealing with the original issue)
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