It’s very important to understand the concept of personal productivity in software development. The difference in productivity between a junior developer and a senior developer in this industry is widely considered to be 20 to 1. That’s an industry standard. We believe the ratio is even higher than that, because in many cases a complex problem cannot be solved by a junior developer at all! It will therefore take them an infinite amount of time. The worst projects are the ones that are done by junior developers who finally get a product working, barely, after running the project over budget and way over deadline, but their work has many bugs that wind up costing you money in terms of lost work, even if the bugs are fixed for free. At Reflexion, we won’t even consider hiring junior to mid-level developers, and we’re extremely picky about the senior developers we hire as well.

But senior developers cost more, don’t they? Yes, sometimes they cost us twice as much as a junior developer. However, the important thing is how much can they get done, and therefore what is your total cost. It’s not hard to do the math. Compare a junior developer making, say, $50,000 a year plus benefits. In one year he completes 1 medium sized project and does a terrible job of it. That means it costs the development company more than $50,000 to deliver one medium project, and the client isn’t happy. Now consider a top quality senior developer making twice that, or about $100,000 plus benefits. But he can deliver at least 20 projects of the same size in the same amount of time, and the quality is much, much higher. That means it costs the development company something like $10,000 for a project, and not $50,000 making the use of senior developers one fifth as expensive.

OK, so if senior developers cost twice as much as junior developers and deliver 20 times more work, then of course they’re one fifth as expensive, not to mention that the development managers and the client managers are not going crazy trying to fix the mess that a junior developer has made. That’s why Reflexion uses only senior developers, and only developers that meet our criteria for quality and productivity. Couple that with our Reflexion Application Development methodology, and you can see that it’s not magic that we deliver higher quality applications more quickly and for less cost than other developers. It’s just plain good business sense, for us and for you.