I believe you are talking about a problem that is tantamount to a lack of vision and perceived gain.

What I am talking about is very real loss. There are programmers that in terms of effectiveness and productivity are worth orders of magnitude more to the company than some of their contemporaries. The person who spends 15 minutes thinking outside the box is worth much more than another person who spends all day programming around the framework because that is what they were taught to do.

The only software development tool I’ve seen that is almost guaranteed to increase throughput is the IDE or IDE plug-in like Resharper.

So, the problem of “what have you done for us lately” as it faces developers is one of salesmanship, as talked about here http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?799. It could be a simple matter of charting what is different between this months sales and last months sales. Showing that there has been an increasing in gains, but no increase in work hours logged, phone calls made, travel trips, conferences attended, etc. Though the relationship probably won’t be this straightforward, because any good salesman will start selling harder when he sees he has a more valuable product.

Your comment about the machinist also brings up the point that managers are trained in tactics of how to manage labor workers and not knowledge workers—an impedance mismatch if ever there was one in the affairs of humans. So we as developers have also got to try to educate our superiors on not only how to manage us, but also how to hire us. That is why it is important that some of the more thoughtful and sophisticated of us pull our noses out of the IDE (but maybe not all the way out) at some point in our careers to step into leadership roles.

Why don’t we instead invest in our employees, train them, and who knows maybe even wind up with a person who doesn’t hesitate to think for themselves and a little workplace loyalty in the end?

The key point is IT is a cost center not a profit center and it’s a cost center that can’t really be cut. What I mean by can’t be cut is I have yet to work at a company where the backlog was less than twice the potential workload of the department and growing. So, any training that increases IT productivity shows no direct value to the company. IT is the same size and costs as much (if not more because the better trained programmer wants more pay) so the money has gone down a rat hole.

Contrast that to the same money spent on training to a salesman or a machine operator. Let’s say for $1000 you can get a 25% improvement in programming efficiency, sales efficiency, or machining efficiency. The later two give us 25% more sales from that salesman or 25% more widgets from the machinist. What do we get from the programmer beyond a demand for 25% more money which, unlike the salesman or machinist, doesn’t provide income to match it.

Plus, when someone leaves the value of their training leaves while when we buy someone a new tool the value in that tool says with the company. Also, given the tool doesn’t directly increase the employee’s skills (but does increase their output) it doesn’t drive wage pressure as much (more in that in a minute). So, if $1000 buys a new lathe or new training that increase output 25% the company is more likely to buy the lathe. This is doubly true for IT where, unlike the machinist, we have no visible benefit to the bottom line. So a framework, with easily identifiable cheap users (ie certification programs) looks like a much better use of money than training.

The end result is a perverse situation when after IT writes a new sales tool that increases salesmen throughput by 10% gives the entire sales department a 10% raise (via commissions) and praise for increasing sales and the IT department more “what have you done for me lately” when it comes time for raises or other benefits (and I do see company paid training as a benefit).

Getting back to wage pressure and HR. HR loves certifications because they tend to have a “grep culture”. Their mindset is give me a job requirement that lets me read a resume that I can scan for “certified”, “”, and “3+/5+/7+/etc” to sort. After that you can ask the technical questions and never mind that often that method means rejecting the best candidates before they even get to IT. Plus, I can show them how many certified people applied and what the standard pay for certification is why do you want more? Certifications are almost a neo-union method of controlling page and advancement (probably more like a guild but you get the idea).

Values

Optimizing the cost at a human level shows the inhumanity of corporations who are an incarnation of Mammon i.e. greed justified. Life is not purely about increasing returns to shareholders; it is also about CREATING VALUE and that requires investment in human capital, and treating your people with a basic sense of dignity and respect. In the short term you can exploit human capital to get an extra half percent ROI, but in the long term it is a blight to your nation, and to yourself - it is polluting the environment that nurtures and sustains you.

Views

Frameworks are great at creating separation of concerns to enable specialization in software engineering, but they are no replacement for intelligence and knowledge. When I started becoming adept at front end UI/UX technology, I did not hastily adopt a JS framework, because I knew that doing so would leave me impaired and ignorant of the “bare metal” way that things get done. (For this reason, Computer Science students still take a semester in “Assembly Language,” because it is necessary to know how the machine works at the lowest level of the CPU processing instructions at the binary & byte level.) My peers who skip the hard learning of understanding will get the low hanging fruit first, that is true. But I believe that investment in learning “the real stuff” will carry me higher, being qualified as an analyst and quality engineer not just a coder.