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Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

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221–230 of 325 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#221

Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…

This is true and I totally adhere to it, but, I also think sometimes it's useful to choose the latest and greatest not for the technical aspect, but to attract good devs to work for you.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#222
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do not be seduced by the technology! I want to emphasize this, and expand on it: Your cool tech startup is not about the tech . You exist to solve a problem. Sure, you might use your Cool Tech(TM) to solve the problem. But the salient point is that the problem gets solved. Your customers don't give a rats ass if you solve it with automatic hyperparameter selection for LSTMs, or if you solve it with an Excel macro.…

Agreed. It's one thing if the Cool Tech actually gives you a competitive advantage by solving the problem better, easier, with lower costs, faster, more personalized, etc. Outside of that...it's all about the business. That's why so many successful businesses are built with Ruby and not "benchmark winner of the week" because Ruby tends to deliver on almost all of the business cases around solving problems and growth.…

I remember when ruby was the hot tech a few years ago, frowned upon by conservative developers. I learnt ruby back then. I'm glad ruby is now recognized as a more mature ecosystem that does things well, even though it is one of the boring technologies now.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#223
post #33

If you are working a day job as a programmer (while setting yourself up to go down the startup route), go with contracting as soon as you can, the rates are what you set them at and you should always set them high. The other advice that has been invaluable to me is NEVER EVER reveal your salary to recruiters. Always state what you want to be paid and go from there. When you reveal what you are earning, you are immedi…

Any advice on how to transition from a day programming job to contracting? Any useful resources? Where to find contracting jobs/ through agency or directly approaching clients?

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#224
post #206
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrote about this here in an article titled Just Build it in Django or Rails: https://www.wyc.io/posts/just-build-it-in-django-or-rails/ It's just really hard to beat the reliability, community, ecosystem, and features that are table stakes when using a competent web framework. When you're poking at a new market, you really don't have time to give a shit about writing CSRF middleware. That's one less customer intervie…

I have a couple of criticisms of your article. Firstly, you give a list of successful companies who made the "safe choice" you're advocating, but you fail to mention that at the time the companies adopted those projects they were actually the cool, risky new upstarts. Your first example, Twitter, started in 2006 - a mere 18 or so months after Rails 0.8. If Twitter had followed your advice of using a 13 year old web f…

I agree with you completely that these frameworks are old. They don't get features like websockets immediately. From a performance standpoint, they are lacking with respect to compiled languages. Statically-typed choices have come a long way.

However, for new business owners who don't care so much about getting an A+ for technical excellence, I would still stand by this advice. The benefits of technology maturity and ecosystem are extremely compelling.

Today, for someone who just wants to let their users log in with Facebook, Elixir has far fewer user-friendly resources and will require more technical expertise to produce the same result. How many StackOverflow questions address common woes in these popular frameworks as opposed to the up-and-comers? How easy is it to hire someone to build + maintain? What about for hiring on the cheap? What existing libraries and integrations exist?

Of course, these things get better for new technologies over time. Until then, I can't tell people to use them if it incurs a disproportionate cost to achieve the same return.

Lastly, that "it's old" is not a compelling reason to me to recommend something else. GNU/Linux was created in the 90s, and it's still everywhere and growing. There's a job for an operating system to do, and GNU/Linux solves it well enough for the amount of effort required to use it. I believe the same to be true for Django or Rails in building a fast business prototype for most enterprise or consumer use cases. I think measures of suitability for the task are more relevant than age.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#225

Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…

I'll throw in that this doesn't necessarily mean just use Ruby on Rails and get coding.

I mean, that will probably allow you to ship a bare bones MVP pretty quickly, but making improvements to said MVP in a timely manner may be a different story.

Case in point: I used to work for a company that developed a product that was made in RoR and was probably actually pretty nice looking at one point. Unfortunately customers had ideas for what sort of improvements should be made to the MVP, and very few suggestions were turned down. So, after some time, the codebase grew pretty hellish, and it became harder to release substantial improvements in a reasonably timely manner. If I remember correctly shortly before I left they decided to replace it with something built from scratch using a leaner Ruby framework called Sinatra.

For that reason I'll typically write projects in Node or Golang, but typically Node. They're flexible, they're not a framework, they're not opinionated, but at the same time they both still have robust package ecosystems so I don't have to reinvent the wheel.

And actually, by all means use new technology if you can honestly tell yourself and your customers that it allows you to ship faster. Just remember, you writing code faster != you being able to ship faster. You'll probably have to bring on additional employees, so your choice of tech has to factor in how quickly you can hire and train someone to use your tech stack as well as how well they can reasonably perform with it. That being said, developers who like using your uncommon technology or tech stack are typically going to be a little more enthusiastic, just don't go too far.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#226
post #162

Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…

> Do not be seduced by the technology! I want to emphasize this, and expand on it: Your cool tech startup is not about the tech . You exist to solve a problem. Sure, you might use your Cool Tech(TM) to solve the problem. But the salient point is that the problem gets solved. Your customers don't give a rats ass if you solve it with automatic hyperparameter selection for LSTMs, or if you solve it with an Excel macro.…

> Your cool tech startup is not about the tech.

In some cases it is about the tech.

Instead the suggestion should be to apply the concepts of a minimum viable product relevant to your business problem.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#227
post #170

Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…

what if the customers are engineers?

Our customers are (I work at https://paw.cloud) For us we are happy with django for backend since we can trust it, but when we do cool stuff with django we take a few days to right up a blog article that for us is direct marketing.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#228

Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…

I'll throw in that this doesn't necessarily mean just use Ruby on Rails and get coding. I mean, that will probably allow you to ship a bare bones MVP pretty quickly, but making improvements to said MVP in a timely manner may be a different story. Case in point: I used to work for a company that developed a product that was made in RoR and was probably actually pretty nice looking at one point. Unfortunately customers…

> Case in point: I used to work for a company that developed a product that was made in RoR and was probably actually pretty nice looking at one point. Unfortunately customers had ideas for what sort of improvements should be made to the MVP, and very few suggestions were turned down. So, after some time, the codebase grew pretty hellish, and it became harder to release substantial improvements in a reasonably timely manner.

This is the problem, not Rails. I've been using Rails for years since 2009 without any problems. I've also used PHP, Java, and Node. These projects have survived 5+ years not because of any language or framework but by treating code as a craft.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#229

If you build it, they will not come! Scream it in a loud voice, IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL NOT COME! You are going to have to build it, find them, plead with them, fight their refusals and shove it down their throat. There are many unknown "unicorns" that currently exist as code. The code is done, there's just no users, because the world doesn't even know it's a thing and those that do know have not being convinced t…

On the other hand I've encountered folks who claim to be forming a start up. They've got the name and the logo. They've got the whole pitch ready. They sound enthusiastic and passionate. But... they still have to find a technical person to actually build it. They basically have nothing. And I often think there are too many people going around spouting wisdom for example about how you _must_ let customers and market d…

My favourite was a slide deck pitched to me where they had 9 people on their 'team slide' with not one of them being a technical person. They were trying to build a phone/fax social database to compete with facebook.

It still hasn't shipped and that was 5 years ago.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#230

Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…

I disagree. Technology is actually an advantage. I would look at it this way, if you used N tech, and it actually results in a faster, better app, meaning happier users and therefore more business. TLDR; use technology that gives you an advantage.

new tech & research usually make little business. but are often a win for everyone.
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