“Hey, I hear you’re a programmer! That’s great, because my buddy and I have this idea for a business. We have everything important figured out, and all we need is a programmer to throw it together.”
The sheer number of times I have been approached with this same phrase… 😂
I fell for it once, high school friend, seemed like a reasonable idea, I was early in my career and looking for experience. I did learn a lot but ultimately the business failed before it started and I got paid a few 100 for nearly as many hours work.
Good article, but I’d guess the reality is more like 25-50x as much work as non-technical people assume, and a good interface takes about 5x the work of everything else.
They don’t merely underestimate the non-interface work, they greatly underestimate the interface work as well.
As a rough estimation, if you include everything (apperance, discussion, functionality, interaction with other controls, …) I would say that every single input field or button is about a day of work. And then you start to realise how many buttons there is in any GUI and how much it will cost.
That’s an interesting way to start the estimation. My first thought was ‘no way’, but then I thought more about it and I agree more and more. I’d bet that you get a lot of push-back from people when you use that estimate, especially those who don’t understand what goes on behind the scenes.
That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, just that it triggers people into a negative reaction.
I never had to use this estimate in front of a client, but if I had, I would decompose it first before giving the total estimate. If there is about 10 items to do per button, so 10 buttons would be a hundred complexe tasks. So let say that it take an hour per task, but since we are fast we can do 10 a day. So suddenly 10 working days, or said otherwise 2 weeks don’t seems unrealistics for this apparently simple 10 buttons task.
Hey, could you do your job for free for me during your free time? Because I don’t respect your time.
Also, I need your skills, but conversely, I believe they are wholely worthless, so I am offering literally nothing in compensation.The words of either a sociopath or reality divorced narcissist.
there isn’t that much to it
This gets to me soooo hard. If there’s so little to it, why are you talking to a professional?
Surely your advanced business intellect is enough to bash out this tiny easy program?Edit: un-inuendo’ed
Gets me soooo hard
I think I know what you meant but be aware that this can be very misinterpreted.
Lol oops. Was so angry wasn’t thinking of the innuendo.
The red flag came earlier than the author indicated.
We have everything important figured out
No, you don’t.
You don’t have buy-in from, seemingly, anyone. You don’t have investment to pay for labor, meaning that no one except you and some other daydreamer have any faith in your idea.
Which puts your idea on par with my niece’s idea to have ice cream for breakfast, and her brother’s endorsement of it.
An idea being simple - even by the standard of someone without the ability to assess its simplicity - still doesn’t make it a good one.
Hmmm seems like she might be on to something there!
This isn’t a software thing. This is people filtering for suckers. They want to find other people to do their work but they want to keep the value created from that work.
We have everything important figured out
well that’s how we know that you haven’t, because if you had actually spent enough time on it to think everything through, you wouldn’t be so confident about what you know and what you don’t know
The three points
- software is easy to write
- in a business, the software is the icing on the cake
- software developers are cogs in a machine, or interchangeable components of an assembly line
These are pervasive within business. There’s a strong divide between business folk and workers. To business folk, they are the major part of the business. Without them, the business would not exist, therefore they deserve the higher salaries, the big cars, the nice yachts, the position, the power, the wealth. Workers of any kind would be mindless drones that implement and execute business dictations, therefore they may be replaced at will, and pay vs worker happiness can be min-maxxed.
If we want to change that dynamic, these kinds of people (“hey bro, I have this idea you can implement for me for free”) should not be allowed to become business owners. Worker-owned collectives should be the future.
Just learn Python bro. It’s totally not hard bro. I made websites in high school bro. Using only Excel spreadsheets bro. Just stop being lazy bro.
If that motivational speech won’t inspire any business person learn programming, nothing ever will. Try it on your friends and family!
Hey, so, we aren’t really prepared to pay. I mean there isn’t that much to it, it’s just a website with a database, I was hoping you could just throw it together as a favor.
We’re like oompa loompas to their willy wonka complex.
This reminds me of Glootie.
Glootie is a character that first appeared in Introducing: Glootie! […] He has DO NOT DEVELOP MY APP tattooed on his forehead.
Someone like Glootie once once asked me to develop his app. I expertly dodged the bullet by referring him to an organization that coordinates freelance developments. Someone explained to him that he’d need 1 or 2 developers plus a project manager, and probably told him typically hourly rate and number of hours for such projects. Never heard him again speak about the app.
Is this view surprising to anyone?
I mean for the last twenty years, every ad on TV is telling everybody you can become a top notch programmer after SIX WEEK camp!
Hell, I fought with an old director in IT healthcare constantly because they thought everyone in the department could pick up SQL and write their own queries in their spare time and we didn’t need a dedicated programmer…
SQL isn’t hard to learn unless they’re asking you guys to do T-SQL and PLSQL.
For simple queries it’s pretty easy.
What could possibly go wrong letting non-programmers write raw sql directly to the production db, it’s pretty easy right.
Ooof my guy if you got folks running queries on your PROD db you got bigger problems even if they were the best SQL writers in the world.
You can’t fuck up step 1 and complain the rest of the steps aren’t working. I write and maintain a set of ELT jobs and a bunch of front end dashboards. By default, we never run analytics queries in PROD db. I create views and such for the simple queries to run.
I picked up SQL a few years ago for a school project. It took me a week. The DBA stuff just came by itself as I went along. Query optimizations took a while but you don’t need to write every query super optimally. If the DB tables are set up correctly your users will not have to worry about it at all.
My previous comment assumes you guys already have a db set up for analytics where folks can run queries. If you don’t then IDK how the director of IT got their job…That’s very basic shit.
Ooof my guy, the comment you originally replied to - to brag about how easy sql is - literally said he had an IT director 20 years ago trying to get everyone in the department to write SQL queries, where did he mention frontend dash boards? How can an IT director be that stupid… what is this thread about and why do you think he shared that anecdote? A thread about idiots asking for stupid shit… I wonder what could possibly be reason, we may never know but I’m sure you’ll explain it to us.
Sorry dude…writing simple queries is what I said was easy…and for the record they are. That example is probably not a great example. Simply from my experience, I never started my career in IT, I was in healthcare and far from it all.
Anyway, I’ve had some idiots approach me about their shitty ideas before too…most notably was one person asking to create an app that “uses AI” to help a person search for the right individual when they send a text message. Couldn’t explain how it would know that it found the right person? There was another one that wanted to track the origin of “content” and how it changes over time on social media… again “using AI”.
So they hit the production database or do you have it mirrored or replicated? And when everybody is running their queries overnight because the “database is slow”… not knowing SARGability? Yes, there’s a place, but “simple queries” are rarely.
For my team I have a mirror that I set up and have a bunch of ELT jobs that load the deltas every night. Queries don’t ever run in PROD, if someone needs a specific view or more data, they go through me and my team. I also set timeouts, precisely to avoid the ahole from using Select * from. Also have a bunch of reports I created to see who is running what queries and timings. We review them quarterly or when someone complains or when a project that needs our data asks us for access.
We also have an autogenerated data dictionary for folks to use as well. Generally I don’t entertain any “it’s slow” complaints unless they go through the documentation, provide their exact query and write what it is they’re trying to get.
My assumption was that OPs shop does the bare minimum in terms of making sure they don’t shoot themselves in the foot.
Nicely done, dude.
I write embedded firmware for my own business’ products and I fall into this trap myself.
I wanted to whip out a basic little product for my business thinking it would take two months of hardware design and a couple weeks of C.
A year later it’s a neat little product…
This is why I don’t even ask for details anymore, just 5x my current salary with at least a 2 year contract
I see tech people doing this to sales, marketing, and bizdev people sometimes as well. I’ve created this thing, it’s all done I just need someone to sell/market it …
Do you mean “for free” or do you mean that tech people ask with the assumption that it’s easy?
Mostly I mean the assumption that’s easy and that you can just “do sales and marketing” after the fact. Sales people are too “sales” to work for free. :-)
I’m actually curious about this. After a product has been made by a company and marketing comes in, what would be their optimal role? They have to make the product market ready and make it presentable for a target market, don’t they? That means finding which target market the product fits, how big the market is, what the market is interested in or needs, what the product needs (or doesn’t) in order to be able to sold in that market, what it should look like (?), how the company itself should position itself with their branding, what the brand is and looks like (colors, font, placement, etc.), …
That’s what I’ve gathered from being in companies that had no marketing, hired marketing people, and the marketing people having long discussions and looking utterly exasperated due to being brought in so late (years after a product was made).
So, I’m curious, what would the optimal project look like for marketers (marketeers?)?
So I’m neither a marketing or sales guy, though I have done a bit of both.
What I’d say is that if you are trying to create a successful business / product … you need to be considering marketing/sales before you actually build anything. The classic tech founder mistake is to build something nobody wants. Or that costs more to produce/support than you can sell it for.
I’ve got a funny story about a dotcom era business I worked for, where an amazing tech team built this product that was miles better than anything our competitors were doing. We spent 18 months getting it all built out etc. And then the business guy came in and ran the numbers and pointed out to us that our return on investment was longer than the replacement cycle of our hardware. Oops …
