Cheap developers are more expensive.
Why? Think long-term. Think total cost of ownership.
Cheap developers are only first-order cheap. You pay them less, whether salary or hourly. Sure, they’re probably not as skilled as more first-order-expensive developers, but they can “crank out” code. They’re making your features work.
They’re not higher-order cheap, though. No way. There’s a high probability that any and all code they write will be difficult to maintain.
Some people might call this technical debt. It’s not. It’s simply a mess. Technical debt is a tradeoff that comes from conscious choice. A mess is the result of negligence and/or incompetence.
As your first-order-cheap developers’ mess grows, you’ll want to make changes to your software. But when you try to add features, or to make even small changes, you’ll find the pace of development plummets. Because now they need to decipher their previous mess in order to change anything. And that’s not easy — it’s a mess, after all. Seemingly unrelated things will break when changes are made. Frequently. Trust and morale on the team tend to break, too, at this point.
So I’ll say it again: Cheap developers are more expensive.
