Not always true. This is a bit of a myth I myself sometimes fall for. Tools and implementation require a lot of very skilled workers to become cheap, because they must know all the traps that any language or framework implicitly or explicitly adds.
For example, I have been learning SwiftUI lately as it is sold as the new cool shiny stuff, and coming from a backend background it was nice at first, until I started fighting with xcode, "this thing is not possible yet in swiftui, so you must wrap an ns controller", etc. Now that I know these issues I am not anymore the clueless guy but I would still consider myself pretty junior in this field/technology: are you happy to have someone with 0 experience do this kind of work? Then yes, it's cheap in terms of salary and expensive in terms of time/quality of your product. The guy learns and eventually leaves to make more money.
Ps: overall I agree that requirements and dependencies are costly too. I wouldn't underestimate the costs of language/tools/technology though.
I think that assuming that technology is secondary is a trap that skilled developers encounter when moving into management-they assume that development is as easy for others as it is for them. When I moved into technical management, I was fortunate enough to work with high performing teams for a while, so when I encountered a poor performing team (the team lead didn’t know basic good practices, and bug counts rocketed up because of an inexperienced dev team) it was a nasty shock.
mk89|2 years ago
Not always true. This is a bit of a myth I myself sometimes fall for. Tools and implementation require a lot of very skilled workers to become cheap, because they must know all the traps that any language or framework implicitly or explicitly adds.
For example, I have been learning SwiftUI lately as it is sold as the new cool shiny stuff, and coming from a backend background it was nice at first, until I started fighting with xcode, "this thing is not possible yet in swiftui, so you must wrap an ns controller", etc. Now that I know these issues I am not anymore the clueless guy but I would still consider myself pretty junior in this field/technology: are you happy to have someone with 0 experience do this kind of work? Then yes, it's cheap in terms of salary and expensive in terms of time/quality of your product. The guy learns and eventually leaves to make more money.
Ps: overall I agree that requirements and dependencies are costly too. I wouldn't underestimate the costs of language/tools/technology though.
ern|2 years ago