Or, reading between the lines, "how to speak the language of value to a line-of-business-apps CIO during a negotiation". Instead of of sharpening your hackles (or whatever) when you read stuff like this, try instead (a) appreciating that everyone on HN agrees with you about this guy's worldview, and (b) distilling out the guy's pain points and thinking of palatable ways to target them to make way more money than the average dumbfuck kid who signs away a year of his life simply to "learn Java programming" at below-market wages.
You guys are supposed to be entrepreneurs. Here is a guy with lots of money who obviously does not understand why the world is changing, spelling out for all of us what his business pain points are. If you're going to write snarky comments about him, try first as an exercise taking out your checkbook, putting it on the table in front of you, and conducting a two-minutes hate at it. Take that, money! You don't know software development! Ha!
Stop berating people like this and get busy taking all their moneys.
At the end of the day, I treat entrepreneurship very differently than a day job. When I'm running a business, my goal is to make the absolute most money I can with the minimum of effort; generally that means producing something of high value and getting it into the hands of as many people as possible. When I'm wearing my day job hat, my goal is very different: how do I do cool things while making a sizable chunk of cash? Note the ordering there -- I personally am not (highly) motivated by money in something that I'm doing on a daily basis.
This guy is great for entrepreneurs -- a virtual goldmine ready to be tapped by the first person that figures out how to solve a couple of his issues in a way that can bring in the money; he's terrible for employees who want to have a fun and challenging work environment while making good money. No amount of negotiation is going to fix that, in my opinion.
I'm not at all challenging your assessment of this guy's worldview. I agree with you. I'm just pointing out that a better title for this article might have been something like "what to say in an interview for a line-of-biz dev job interview to add 20% to your annual salary".
This is understandable, but the valuable thing that this article illustrates is how, if you have entrepreneurial leanings, going to work as a developer within a business whose primary product is not related to software is not a winning proposition. Management isn't always a rational creature, and no amount of negotiation can get you a reasonable offer.
Obviously there's a ton of money to be made by catering to businesses that have money, but the best way to extract that money isn't to go and program VB6 all day. It's to start a separate business that offers that same service, which patterns the transaction in such a way that management is willing to pay market rates.
The problem is, I don't want to help a "provider of rights management, licensing and royalty services for the music industry". And I don't feel right taking someone's money and providing no value in return.
My first thought when reading this is that there might be a pile of money to be made in "investigating legacy codebases and providing thorough and succinct reports on their architecture as a service". However, as an aspiring academic, I'll show myself the door now.
You guys are supposed to be entrepreneurs. Here is a guy with lots of money who obviously does not understand why the world is changing, spelling out for all of us what his business pain points are. If you're going to write snarky comments about him, try first as an exercise taking out your checkbook, putting it on the table in front of you, and conducting a two-minutes hate at it. Take that, money! You don't know software development! Ha!
Stop berating people like this and get busy taking all their moneys.