Friday, July 17, 2020

Skilled Developers Aren't Fungible



It angers me just thinking about it: "We want our developers to be fungible".

A large bank I worked with wanted all its software developers to be cross-trained to the point where they were fungible, and could easily be substituted for each other.

"Fungible" is used in finance to mean financial instruments that are so equivalent that they can be used to offset each other. For example, if you could buy a silver contract on a NY exchange, and you can get out of the position by selling a silver contract on the Hong Kong exchange, then the two contracts are considered fungible. The regulators and clearing houses consider them equivalent.

But you can't turn a whole bunch of skilled software engineers, working on different projects, into complete commodities that can replace each other at the drop of a hat.

© 2020 Praveen Puri