Random thoughts about making money in IT.

During my 12 years (and counting) career in IT, I worked for several projects for different companies, some of them had their main product a piece of software, some of them are product based companies for which software is just another department. I made few observations, that I want to share, and I am happy to hear your comments.

1. Companies, which has successful piece of software, which makes them ton of money (either ad revenue, or subscription revenue) usually started as a aside, free, product, and only combination of luck and timing made the software successful. In other words, what makes piece of software (e.g. app or web page). successful is 99% luck and 1% skills (e.g. flappy bird app or ebay or craigslist).

2. Companies with successful product business are very happy to pay millions of USD to create new features to their product, which is based on crap architecture, rather then first spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on first fixing (paying) technical debt so future development will be cheaper, quicker and less bug friendly. In other words, over time productivity tends to zero (too much tech debt) and no one cares about the root cause. Just hire more devs.

3. Companies which are run by people from sales background are happy to spend millions on marketing every year, advertising product with bugs instead of invest part of this money in IT department to allow hire better experts (e.g. seniors instead of mediums, or expert external consultants, etc.)

4. Assuming medium developer salary is 100%, and good developer salary is 150% (where I worked it was the case), and assuming (from my observation that 2 seniors can make job of 4 mediums) companies still won't pay good developers 200% because things like productivity, code quality, system architecture and ability to evolve – are things almost impossible to measure, thus they won't fit into Excel sheets that C-level management loves and based on them the decisions are made.

Just sharing my thoughts, because they were bothering me since long time, and still bothers. I am happy to read your point of view.