By Sarbjit Bakhshi, Lead Technologist ICT, Technology Strategy Board.

The following post is re-posted from Sarbjit's blog.

Having worked with small companies in ICT over a number of years, the most common question I get asked is “Do you know any good programmers willing to do some work for free, or for some future equity”. The answer is, and has always been, “no”. There are many good programmers out there in the UK and they know who they are and how much they can charge. There are plenty of bad programmers out there who will work for peanuts and will encourage in you a great feeling of regret for ever having taken them on.

Often outsourcing to some reputable looking company can cause problems too – their flashy London back end relies on poorly motivated, underskilled programmers in other parts of the world who often take very notable shortcuts and never seem to truly understand your requirements.

Having worked with skilled programmers in the UK, I have found work that has taken others four weeks to do properly (after much back and forth) is completed in a matter of minutes. Good programming is not, as some might think, ephemeral and without substance – it is immediately noticeable in its running (or absence) in systems. Bad programming makes systems run slowly, use more battery power than needed, and causes the software to crash - often when you need it most. So why does good programming seem to have so little value to those that commission code?

I recently attended the Software Sustainability Institute's Collaborations Workshop where one of the sessions was about getting programming recognised as a profession, and how to encourage the perceptions of value of good software engineering. Ideas suggested were to make programming a recognisable profession, with a professional body attached.

Another idea I’ve seen courted in a recent book, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture (Ellen Ruppel Shell, 2012), suggests that we are pathologically orientated towards giving what we feel is a fair price towards goods and services. Paying a below average price for services and goods makes us see fairly priced items as overpriced, and makes us feel that they are bad value for money. If this is the case, what is the cost of selling applications that have taken months (if not years) of effort for 99 cents at an app store?

Take a counter example, Six to Start, a high quality games company based in the UK, released a crowd-funded game that they had been working on called Zombies, Run! When faced with a choice of price on the App Store, they chose the ludicrously (compared to the freemium model) overpriced $7.99 for their game. They reasoned that the quality of the game, the existing fanbase, the uniqueness and value meant that the game was worth at least that, and, recognising the quality, their customer base would pay. Lucky for them, their customer base did buy and it is now one of their best selling games.

So perhaps the future is for us to recognise good software by paying through the pocket for it, and for companies to realise that software budgets should initially be large enough to pay good programmers to work on it.