At Invirgance we believe that the technology industry has over-extended its staffing model. Growing the talent base is a noble goal. However, we have exhausted this strategy past its breaking point. Employment costs have skyrocketed while average candidate qualifications have plummeted.
Our mission is to solve this problem by promoting a combination of advanced management techniques, new technological approaches, and industry training. We seek to enable skilled software engineers to achieve orders of magnitude more productivity. Thereby removing the need for more hiring, more consulting, and more outsourcing. Read on to learn more!
For more than a decade there has been an acute shortage of qualified software engineering talent. The response has been to push for more junior programmers by lowering the standards of CompSci programs. Skilled work has been redefined as familiarity with a particular tool rather than a core understanding of computers as machines. Productivity on an individual basis has dropped even as new technologies are introduced in an attempt to compensate.
Not only has the industry been unable to keep up with demand, the attempts have led to a culture of poor performance. This rising culture is focused on technology as a popularity contest rather than focusing on making your business successful. And your business is paying the price.
Most solutions are no longer designed using the best approach for the needs of the application. Technologies are selected based on what is popular in the industry at the moment. Whether the tool is a correct choice or even a useful fit for your business needs.
This "popularity contest" approach leads to failed projects and ballooning costs for what would otherwise be simple and straightforward projects. Even worse, developers ask to perform an expensive upgrade to the latest "popular thing" when the problems with the last “popular thing” become too overwhelming to maintain.
Generative AI, machine learning, and other advanced neural networks are important to the future of software engineering. These tools bring new capabilities that can be exploited by skilled software engineers to enable businesses in ways never before possible. Yet this technology is misunderstood and misused in an attempt to replace programmers.
Can AI developers replace human software engineers? The answer is a resounding no.
AI programming is at the very bottom of the competence scale in developer productivity. Any time saved in initial development is lost many times over in the maintenance of the software. And that's assuming that the AI can produce correct software to begin with. When AI produces code for common problems it is merely regurgitating common techniques it has seen before.
AIs are rarely able function at the complexity of useful software due to two key limitations.
The first is that generative AI models are designed for understanding and emitting spoken languages like English. Programming languages are not actually spoken languages despite using recognizable words. They are a type of mathematics called Symbolic Logic.
AI models are not trained in Symbolic Logic. They do not understand the logic they are writing and thus cannot produce more than superficially impressive code.
The second issue is that any software worth building requires creative effort. Generative AI models are not yet creative. Efforts to have them puzzle out complex problems are only just starting with models like o1 and DeepSeek. The ability to build expertise from solved problems does not yet exist.
As important as AI is it is not the solution to our staffing problems.
Our experience is that the only solution to an intractable problem is to do “the thing that must not be done.” What is the thing that must not be done? The thing that must not be done in technology is to hire fewer software engineers. After all, how can we be more productive with fewer engineers?
Yet our experiments in the industry have successfully achieved between a 20x - 100x productivity boost in full team performance across numerous companies and teams.
This incredible productivity boost was achieved through advanced management techniques that promoted better technology, which then exposed large gaps in the way the industry approaches common issues.
At Invirgance we are sharing our knowledge with the industry in hopes of promoting widespread adoption of these incredible productivity results.
Want to know more? Contact us today for a FREE consultation!