Windows & .NET Watch: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Economy

By Larry O'Brien

October 15, 2009 —

Don’t Panic.

Sure, right now things are unpleasantly like being drunk (“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” “You ask a glass of water.” Douglas Adams, you are missed), but it looks like we’ve dodged the feared economic apocalypse. The ironically good news is that the software development industry faced its brutal introduction to the 21st century already, when it was our own industry that frothed over. Wages deteriorated, jobs migrated overseas, and complacency about skills and opportunities was replaced by a focus on quality and productivity. Right?

Although traditionally the steeper the economic drop, the steeper the recovery, most economists say that this recession will have an “L-” or “U-” shaped recovery, since so much household wealth has been lost. On the other hand, business technology has already languished for most of the past decade, and there seems to be a good deal of pressure from a “shadow inventory” of undeveloped applications. Windows 7 looks ready to deliver the upgrade cycle that Vista promised, and mobile applications have finally taken off as targets for mainstream development.

So although it’s scary out there and will continue to be, don’t freak out and turn in your C# compiler for a stake in some rare tulips. This too shall pass.

Neither a borrower nor lender be
As a contractor, I typically ask for a retainer when I first begin working with a customer, but I’ve always applied the retainer against the initial work and, over time, simply billed at the end of the month. This follows from my natural empathy to the customer’s viewpoint that a retainer that is just sitting in a bank account amounts to, at best, an interest-free loan and, at worst, has a taint of being money paid for non-existent work.

The natural consequence of “bill as you go” is that as a contractor, you’re extending credit to your customer. If, like me, you bill once a month, don’t expect to receive the payment for two weeks and then try to work things out before stopping work. You’ve got two months of your own time hanging out there. Even worse, if you pay subcontractors and pass through their billing, you might have as much as 10 weeks of obligations that are reliant on the good faith of your client.

A not entirely shocking lesson of business is that people’s “good faith” operates strictly through a lens of their own self-interest. This summer, following a human tragedy (the death of the project manager), the president of a client company stepped in, realized that there was no way to launch soon, freaked out, and declared that my company had been “paid enough” for the work we’d delivered. I said that if our conversation ended without him committing to paying what he owed, I’d be telling my developers that afternoon to stop work. We both felt that the other was suddenly acting in bad faith.

Merits aside, I made a business mistake. A lone developer risks “only” his or her own time. A large company can amortize the risk of occurrence and cost of recovery from a deadbeat client. A small company, in hard economic times, has to manage their balance sheet better than I did, even if it means making the initial negotiation of contract terms a little more difficult.

Upgrade your bits
As a software developer, your job is simple: rapid development of business value. You need a brain, a computer and development tools. Brains are evenly distributed and fast computers are commodities. It’s in the tool suite where those in the first world maintain an edge over those in developing economies.

Take, for instance, MonoTouch, Novell’s recently released tool for programming the iPhone with C# and .NET. It costs US$400 on top of the normal iPhone development requirements: the purchase of an iPhone and a Mac. That may be a prohibitive set of costs for those living outside of North America or Europe. But for those with .NET backgrounds, the freedom to choose between C# and Objective C as a development language is of great value. If MonoTouch allows you to make a presentation prototype, it might mean the difference between a project going forward or not. (Whether the benefits of C# justify a MonoTouch dependency in a deployed application is something I’ll discuss in a forthcoming column.)

Keep your job
Perhaps surprisingly, even in this economy, wages are increasing for those with jobs. Unemployment is at a multi-decade high, but most employed people have received a raise in the past year. This is in accordance with the “sticky wage” economic theory, which holds that even with decreased labor demand, companies will hesitate to lower pay, fearing unmotivated and disgruntled employees.

So, keep your chin up. The economy is bad, but it’s not as bad as Vogon poetry.

Larry O'Brien is a technology consultant, analyst and writer. Read his blog at www.knowing.net.

Related Search Term(s): professional development

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