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INDUSTRY WATCH:
The Once and Future Kings
By Alan Zeichick
 August 15, 2004 —The phrase “The Once and Future King” has been used in many contexts, but is arguably best known as a title of a collection of books about the mythical King Arthur. Written by T.H. White in the 1950s, those books have nothing to do whatsoever with software development.
Yet that title is fitting as a collective description of software developers. For a two-decade period, from the early 1980s through the end of the 1990s, programmers were universally the fair-haired children not only of the computer industry, but also of the global Fortune 2000. Those brilliant and essential individuals were pampered and adored, their eccentricities valued, their character flaws revered.
A good systems analyst, software architect or coding god (or goddess) was hard to find. They knew it. They received, often without asking, huge salaries, generous stock-option grants and signing bonuses, and waivers from nearly every human-resources best practice. They could come and go whenever they wanted, sleep at their desk, bring their dogs to the office, play Foosball, park their Lamborghinis in the lobby, drink Jolt cola, go on sabbatical after two years, and forget to bathe or change clothes. As long as they kept crankin’ out that golden code, there were no rules.
The developer was king. Whether in Silicon Valley, on Route 128 or in other clusters, it was a golden age. It was, in a word, nerdvana, forever captured in early Dilbert cartoons and piles of unwashed product-launch T-shirts.
In fact, many of the corporate cultural changes initially put in place to encourage software developers (and their colleagues, the hardware engineers) began to migrate outside of the IT department. Foosball tables, fridges full of free software drinks and company masseuses spread throughout different industries. While it seemed that venture-funded start-ups on the fast track to an IPO had the most generous culture, competition dictated that even old-economy firms had to loosen up beyond dress-down Fridays.
Pop Goes the Bubble
Then the recession happened. Stock options evaporated, companies closed. The well of IPOs and easy venture money dried up. VCs, stock analysts and entrepreneurs would no longer tolerate the excess head count and employee perks. We saw the Foosball table be sublet to another tenant, the free-drink fridge be replaced by a vending machine, the sign-up bonuses disappear.
Suddenly, developers were mortal. No longer king, they had to wash their shirts. They had to show up at meetings. Forget about stock options—they had to keep their jobs. Even so, there were layoffs for many, and less generous compensation for the survivors. Never mind the purple of royalty; they were just ordinary white-collar workers, even if the white collar was a Beefy-T.
That was just the first round. The spectre of offshoring is causing CEOs and CFOs to re-examine their staffing policies, with developers in California and Massachusetts competing salary-wise against those in India, China and Russia. Suddenly, the rock-climbing walls and sabbaticals seem a vague memory from the late Cretaceous period.
Or are they?
There are signs and portents of resurrection of the high-tech economy. They’re subtle and may simply be a false alarm, but the signs are there nonetheless. The long-awaited initial public offering of Google, for example, is coming, and the company set an extremely optimistic price target for its stock that would value them between US$29 and $36 billion. Then there’s Salesforce.com, which announced its own IPO with a more earthly market cap of US$1.2 billion.
Both Google and Salesforce are dot-coms. Does that mean the dot-com era is coming back, that your CEO should order more Foosball tables? Is the developer about to become king once more?
Still Popped
The dynamics have changed, not only in business but in the way that software is developed. That so many talented out-of-work individuals are now willing to put on clean blue jeans and brown-bag their lunch means the culture of developer-worship will never return, at least not to the same extent.
Developers are mortal. Or so they now know. Their colleagues, managers, executives, venture capitalists and the stock market know that too.
But that doesn’t mean that developers are doomed to a life of soggy tuna-fish sandwiches instead of filet mignon at the company cafeteria.
The team of programmers who slogged through a death-march project to bring an EDI system online with Wal-Mart, or who set up a company’s migration from mainframes to Linux clusters running J2EE app servers, or who created Web-based interfaces to a company’s 20 different apps will always be important. Someday that will be revered again. They just won’t be as revered as they used to be, and they may never see the return of the get-rich IPO.
Overall, as we ponder the fate of our once and future kings—and queens—of software development, that’s ultimately a healthier situation to live in.
Alan Zeichick is editor-in-chief of SD Times. David Rubinstein is enjoying a dot-com-era sabbatical.
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