Quintessence Worth £Billions

Let’s do a little back-of-a-fag-packet math re: Quintessence.

There’s somewhere around 26 million software developers worldwide.

A typical software developer, including on-costs, runs out at about £30,000 per annum (UK more like £90K, BRIC countries maybe £10k).

So that’s a world-wide spend of some (26m * 30k) = £780 billion (thousand million), per annum.

Given an uplift in productivity of 5-8 times for Quintessential development approaches, that’s an annual, recurring cost reduction (saving) of £624 billion to £682.5 billion.

You may find claimed productivity increases of this magnitude (5-8 times) somewhat unbelievable (despite the evidence). So let’s be conservative and propose a modest doubling of productivity. That would mean an annual, recurring cost reduction (saving) of £390 billion. Still not to be sniffed at.

For The Individual Organisation

Let’s consider a single UK-based organisation with 100 developers. Present costs (for the developers alone) will be around £90k * 100 = £9 million annually (more or less, depending on a number of factors). Again, assuming a modest doubling of productivity*, a quintessential approach would garner an annual, recurring cost reduction (saving) of £4.5 million for this example organisation.

What do these figures tell us? That the world and individual organisations both are not at all interested in reducing software development costs (or increasing software development productivity). Or maybe they just don’t believe it’s possible to be any more productive than they are already (it is possible to be much more productive, see e.g. RIghtshifting).

*Or getting twice as much done in a given time, for the same spend. Or halving the time it takes to get something done, for the same spend.

– Bob

—Think Different

Making Lives More Wonderful

Quintessence Worth £Billions