This guy is working on the “Suck It, Czar” App. It’s going to make millions.

GorT is a manager of 20+ software engineers in two different cities in the United States.  GorT has been in the software industry for 20+ years and this group is one of the highest performing and talented teams he’s seen – both in competitors, partners and within companies at which he’s worked.

Having said that, many of the developers are in the millennial generation and have expressed opinions that lead me to believe that the instant gratification culture that they grew up in has set a level of expectations that is unreasonable and, frankly, dangerous.  These behaviors range from salary expectations to people departing in order to chase making millions by pushing out the next “Yo!” app on the iTunes App Store.

I wonder if they have an appreciation of the numbers involved here.  There are some infamous questions that companies like Google ask (or used to ask) in their interviewing process that go something like, “How many piano tuners are there in the United States?”  In that vein, how many developers are there in the United States?  The IDC recently estimated that there are 18,539,000 software developers in the world with 19.2% or about 3.5 million in the United States.  Even if you took the top 10% of those as the cream of the crop (and consider yourself one of them) who can knock out great apps that will land them a fortune, you’re competing with 349,999 others for that chance.  While that’s better odds than a lottery ticket.  But wait, there’s more.  A study shows that 50% of the revenue from apps in the iTunes Store (at least a few years ago) was collected by 25 game companies.  So that payout might be a little harder to reach.  Forbes shows that in 2012, $5B was paid out to developers of apps on the store.  Factoring out 50% to those game companies, that leaves $2.5B for the rest.  Forbes continues in the article and concludes that, for Apple apps, the average developer payout is $21,276 (The Google apps and Microsoft apps fare worse).

GorT suspects that the app development market is getting diluted and the chance of being that one major hit (i.e. Angry Birds*) by a single developer is a pipe dream at best.  The numbers show that working at a decent software development firm pulling down anywhere from three to ten times that average payout – depending on years of experience, market, etc. – is a much better opportunity.

Although you could buy a lottery ticket on the way home too.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.