As the technology revolution continues on at an ever increasing pace the role of the software engineer is becoming ever more important. Although the need to solve problems with clever electronic circuitry is still very much there, the big advances in product design these days are being made in the software engineering. Why? As well as the average PC becoming ever more powerful so too is the low cost embedded processor, and these tend to be designed into pretty much any electronic product these days, from an iPhone to a dishwasher. The performance and capabilities of today’s embedded processors costing just a few dollars is simply amazing and with a carefully selected device designed into a new product the task of programming it is becoming more and more of the overall development requirement.
No problem then that it’s recently been found that productivity gains in software engineering far outstrip other business areas. Pretty much everyone is more productive these days. According to recent data from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, today’s business workers average around 30% more productive than their 1998 counterparts, or a productivity growth of roughly 2.6% per year. Many areas of business have seen higher growth from the advances in IT and the ability to find and deal with all sorts of information much more quickly and efficiently. However, the most dramatic gains have occurred within software development.
It is claimed that software engineers are around 200-400% more productive today than 10 years ago. This can be attributed to many things such as open source software, ever more powerful processors, better libraries and massive general information sharing via the web (software engineers have not surprisingly tended to know how to make best use of the web and embraced web 2.0 technologies long before the general masses).
You’re probably familiar with Moore’s Law which states that the power of computers doubles every 18 months or so. Well, the productivity of good software engineers has tended to double every 5 years or so. That equates to productivity growth of nearly 15% a year!
This can mean a couple of things for companies out there looking to develop products. Firstly, good software engineers are a great investment for a company. Whilst its hard to accurately measure their productivity growth over the short term, unlike sales based team members, if you look at the longer term trend they are far ahead of other business fields. Alternatively if you’re looking for a company like us to provide technical development for you, spend on software development has become ever more cost effective for you. This is because whilst software engineering productivity may have seen these massive gains, software engineers pay hasn’t! There are many out there who see this as a problem, often attributed to the off shoring of development skills to lower cost countries. However, whatever one feels about this the truth is that good software engineers are paid well in the West and are still very much in demand.
So if you’re considering undertaking some product development work in the future, consider what the software can bring to your product and the amazing bargain you can get it for!
