I’ve just finished reading this and I’m thinking that it explains some of the malaise in the open source community:
Simply put – suits think that using LAMP (look it up if you don’t know what it is) is cheap. You don’t have to pay the megabucks to IBM or Oracle for the database and the middleware and it’ll run quite happily on second-hand tin from eBay. In their pointy heads this equates to spending less money on the programmers and designers as well.
So, all of the LAMP jobs out there (at least in the UK) are junior roles paying junior cash. The suits haven’t grasped that good software is primarily about recruiting and motiviating good, intelligent people (the whole ruck of them, including project managers and experienced designers). That’s why all of the innovation is in small companies owned by people who pay themselves decent salaries. The bigger salaries still cluster around the old client-server tools (OK, web-enabled like Oracle Forms, but you know what I mean) and the big-corps who need whatever IBM/Oracle/etc. can offer.
Finding work as a designer, which I’m good at and have done well for years, is hard. I’ve found myself in a hybrid roles and doing grunt work again and again, unable to help others improve and improve myself by doing so.
Maybe I should apply for an enterprise loan … I have product, just no time to finish it properly.
(yeah, I know, marketing plan, budget freebies, partners yada yada bing bong)