Software developers seem to be significantly more productive today than they were even a few years ago. What has happened? Have techniques improved? Have skill levels increased? Are best-practices being more closely adhered to?
One cannot easily isolate any one factor as bearing sole responsibility for the performance improvements, but I suspect that a great deal of our gratitude should be directed towards improvements in the availability, quality and performance of software libraries, together with growing communities around those libraries, promoting education and adoption in the wider engineering community.
After all, the one thing that makes software development so different from other disciplines are the tremendous cost savings available through reuse. The less logic your organization is responsible for, the less the expenditure on development, documentation and maintenance. The main expense incurred when using tools and libraries is in education and training ... this is perhaps not something that we as an industry have fully adjusted to:- neither in the way that we (as professionals) specialize; nor in the way that we (as organizations) recruit new talent or nurture existing talent.
In fact, the notion of talent as something that is exclusively innate and inimitable is a dangerous one. When one makes an experienced hire, the commodity that one is purchasing is (primarily) knowledge, rather than the commission of work/effort to be expended. The knowledge that is required to not have to do the work, to be more precise. Perhaps we need to introduce new work and employment patterns beyond the traditional notions of contractor and perm employee?
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