Keyvan Nayyeri

This is supposed to be the first part of a new post series that I’m going to write about one of the several aspects of software development with an emphasis on human resources and the influence of developer skills on the software projects. By the way, recently I’ve been publishing many post series, and I would look for an alternative option to break lengthy contents into smaller parts because having many posts series may reduce the quality on a blog.

I used to think about the answer of this question seriously: which kind of worker would you prefer to hire? An adept worker with high salaries and rates that refines your quality and work, an amateur worker with low wage that saves your money, or someone mediocre?

A wise answer to this question (if it exists) needs a lot of discussion and research and there have been many studies (along publications) on this topic so far. From a business point of view, managers would prefer to have a balance between their money and their human resources in order to earn more profit from the product or service.

I don’t want to argue about this topic (as I’m not ostensibly able to cover all its aspects) but one point that could catch my attention is the wrong belief among many software industry owners that there is an opposite relationship between the skill level of developers and the final total costs of a project in regard to other factors such as quality and time. I think that most of the business owners have this wrong belief, and I’m going to analyze this from several aspects with some evidence that I’ll collect from here and there.

At first glance, it may sound like a logical claim to consider an opposite relationship between the skill level (hence salaries) and project costs because this is the natural relationship in other fields, businesses, and industries, but in the software world this is different.

My approach is to write a few posts and walk through the main steps in software development and discuss the influence of skill levels on saving the money and time in order to provide enough details to support that hiring a skillful employee in software development is worth the effort, and can save the money and speed up the development.

But for now and in essence, I can state that the higher level of skills a developer has, the faster he can develop a project, and the better he can do that; therefore, a software project developed by a more experienced developer is evidently developed faster, has a better quality, has less bugs, and satisfies the customer much better. Besides, the cost of software testing and future expansions is less than a project that is developed by a less experienced developer.

Let me give my reasons, statistics, and supporting details in the upcoming blog posts. Those who frequently read software development books should be familiar with such stuff but it may be interesting for others.