> Also, companies are scared of the mere possibility of their programmers leaving.
Have they ever considered that programmers might be less likely to leave if they got a decent salary?
I've got to say, much of this sounds familiar. In Netherland, I used to hear companies complain that it was so hard to find technical people (programming and otherwise). At the same time, the jobs I saw didn't really pay all that much. The solution is simple: pay better, and people will come.
The problem is that in Netherland, management is/was seen as better, more important, higher status and deserving of better pay than programming. So for a programmer to move on beyond a certain point, he'd have to go into management. If programming jobs were seen as equal to management (in status and pay), programmers would have no reason to switch. Netherland is very much a management-oriented culture, for some reason.
Another is education. Politicians always kept talking about the knowledge economy, while at the same time cutting costs for education, and there was not a particular stimulus for technical education. And students are more likely to choose something management-related when they think there's more money there.
I'm talking somewhat in the past tense, because it feels to me like things have changed. I made enormous jumps in income over the past couple of years (could be because of the switch to freelancing and mostly working for banks since then), and the management-over-tech attitude seems to have diminished a bit (though that could be because of Scrum, which emphasizes empowered development teams and makes management somewhat redundant at times). I don't have any recent data on this, though. Maybe it's just my personal situation that has gotten better.
Have they ever considered that programmers might be less likely to leave if they got a decent salary?
I've got to say, much of this sounds familiar. In Netherland, I used to hear companies complain that it was so hard to find technical people (programming and otherwise). At the same time, the jobs I saw didn't really pay all that much. The solution is simple: pay better, and people will come.
The problem is that in Netherland, management is/was seen as better, more important, higher status and deserving of better pay than programming. So for a programmer to move on beyond a certain point, he'd have to go into management. If programming jobs were seen as equal to management (in status and pay), programmers would have no reason to switch. Netherland is very much a management-oriented culture, for some reason.
Another is education. Politicians always kept talking about the knowledge economy, while at the same time cutting costs for education, and there was not a particular stimulus for technical education. And students are more likely to choose something management-related when they think there's more money there.
I'm talking somewhat in the past tense, because it feels to me like things have changed. I made enormous jumps in income over the past couple of years (could be because of the switch to freelancing and mostly working for banks since then), and the management-over-tech attitude seems to have diminished a bit (though that could be because of Scrum, which emphasizes empowered development teams and makes management somewhat redundant at times). I don't have any recent data on this, though. Maybe it's just my personal situation that has gotten better.