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The Cost of Developers

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Re: The Cost of Developers

#101

Post by pjmlp »

scarface74 wrote: post #89
pjmlp wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In SV maybe. I have been developing mostly new WPF enterprise applications in the last 4 years and there is plenty of work across European business.

I've been on the opposite coast in a major metro system for the last 20 years. I've been an "Enterprise Developer" for the last 10. The number of companies that are wanting new programs that are not either web or mobile based is slim.

The focus of Google making ChromeOS desktop friendly with Android native apps, and exposing the underlying GNU/Linux userspace shows they see pressure in desktop market.

Another example is how across Europe, Windows 10 2-1 convertibles are basically wiping out Android tablets at consumer stores.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#102

Post by scarface74 »

wetpaws wrote: post #87
compcoffee wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Walk into a VCs office and tell them that you have the next great idea for a Windows app and watch how fast you get laughed out of the office. In most of the world the "goal" isn't to go raise VC money. It's to develop a product and earn a living. Maybe people building Windows apps for the massive market are doing okay without the desire to raise billions and take over the world?

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus-web-... This is an excellent overview from a developer point on why you don't want to develop desktop apps even if you don't want to depend on VC. This is 2009, mind you.

Desktop internal apps are a nightmare. Deployment is more difficult, it's harder to find developers willing to work on them, the only way you can access them remotely from a mobile device is using something like Citrix Server, the desktop management tools that you can use to deploy desktop apps are error prone, etc.

I said VC, but even as an architect of internal line of business enterprise apps, I would be kicked out of any managers office if I suggested developing a desktop app.

Heck these days it's hard to convince companies to write real native mobile apps instead of using one of the cross platform web based mobile app platforms.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#103

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

scarface74 wrote: post #83
compcoffee wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Walk into a VCs office and tell them that you have the next great idea for a Windows app and watch how fast you get laughed out of the office. In most of the world the "goal" isn't to go raise VC money. It's to develop a product and earn a living. Maybe people building Windows apps for the massive market are doing okay without the desire to raise billions and take over the world?

Yes. My goal is also to make money as well as most other developers. Would you suggest I turn the focus of my career back to writing Win32 API based apps or WPF or UWP apps? Where are all of these companies that are making money selling Windows apps? Where all of the jobs for Windows desktop developers?

In the place of myth and legend: outside of SV. I know, it's crazy.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#104

Post by throwawayqdhd »

Solid analysis as always.

As a Windows user, I'm finding it increasingly harder to justify using the OS. Pretty much every single software I use to get my work done works in my browser.

The only software that runs natively is Ableton, which works perhaps even better on Mac. If I haven't switched, it's simply because of laziness: it would be too much of a hassle to copy all my samples to another device and reinstall all my plugins

Re: The Cost of Developers

#105

Post by jasode »

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #100
jasode wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>, github sold out to investors, >Investors were in this for a huge exit I think these excerpts from your comment and also DHH's "VCs need their pound of flesh" are not helpful for readers on how to analyze the situation. They (maybe unintentionally) taint the discussion. Github is an entity owned by human beings. The founders included Chris Wanstrath, Tom Preston-Werner, PJ Hyett, and Scott Chacon. Therefore, emphas…

From the standpoint of an end user (which is all of the people complaining about Microsoft acquiring Github) VCs and their money are the bad guys, because the dynamics of their investment is what causes the acquisitions which change the service in ways that I (the end user) do not like. Not saying they're right or wrong (I think at the very least it's a limited point of view) but that's the argument being made.

>VCs and their money are the bad guys, because the dynamics of their [the VCs] investment

You're repeating the same "outsourcing of blame" to VCs that I was trying to short circuit.

VCs as an abstraction are a convenient target but that doesn't mean they are the correct target.

The founders of Github such as Chris Wanstrath, Tom Preston-Werner, et al have agency and autonomy. Why are they specifically not included in our analysis?

In other words, why aren't we saying this:

>CW & TPW's desire for VC money are the bad guys, because the dynamics of their request for VC investment

It seems wrong that analysis, blame, and frustration seems to gravitate towards VCs and terminates only at the VCs -- instead of the founders who willingly asked the VCs for the money.

Yes, DHH is against VC money. But maybe CW and TPW don't think about Github exactly the same way as DHH thinks about Basecamp.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#106

Post by kamaal »

dalbasal wrote: post #85
shanghaiaway wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuck has a large stake because he got his seed funding from his parents and could negotiate their series A round from a position of strength.

Musk started with $100m of his own money and a 1-in-a-billion reputation. He had leverage of that kind too, I would say far more than zuck. The real leverage was not needing money after that A round.

Musk didn't start with $100 million. He started his second round of start ups with the money made from the first ones. And he didn't have $100 million for the first round of start ups he founded.

In fact Musk has pretty much suffered through all the regular pain founders suffer through.

I remember watching somewhere on Youtube, during his first start up, they would code on a computer by the night and host the application for their users during the day on the same computer.

Re: The Cost of Developers

#107

Post by markm248 »

I don't understand the last sentence:

"That, though, is exactly why Microsoft had to pay so much: buying in directly is a whole lot more expensive than using leverage, which can produce equivalent — or better! — returns for much less investment."

Re: The Cost of Developers

#108

Post by ameister14 »

hsribei wrote: post #34
jillesvangurp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, github sold out to investors, which then owned them, which then sold them out to get an exit when it turned out the company was in no shape for an IPO which is the only reasonable other exit if you are looking for a 10x ROI on a company that burned through hundreds of millions. Investors were in this for a huge exit and they just got it. In fairness, MS bought a valuable social network of essentially the ent…

Gitlab also took VC money and have an exit as their only option. Doubt they'll get as far as GitHub did though, and the option to just grow slowly into a solid independent business is off the table. Probably an acquihire with small return to investors.

Gitlab is really open about building to a 2020 IPO

"We want to IPO in 2020, specifically on Wednesday November 18. 2020 is five years after the first people got stock options with 4 years of vesting. To IPO we need more than $100m in revenue. To achieve that we want to double Incremental Annual Contract Value (IACV) every year. We focus on an incremental number instead of growth of our Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) because ARR growth is misleading. So far we achieved the goal of doubling IACV in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017."

Re: The Cost of Developers

#109

Post by pythonaut_16 »

pjc50 wrote: post #92
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #59

MS paid $7.5 Billion for Github, along with its 28 Million users - it's in the first paragraph of the announcement (1) That's around $268 per Github user. Now MS could have probably made a site comparable to Github for 0.1% of that cost - e.g. revive codeplex, pump a few million into the design, backend, git support and user interactions. But it wouldn't have 28M users. That's what they're paying for. That's the hard…

They did, it was called Visual Studio Team Services. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/06/04/vsts-gith...

And it's awful. Not even comparable to Github and GitLab

Re: The Cost of Developers

#110

Post by Mary-Jane »

throwawayqdhd wrote: post #104

Solid analysis as always. As a Windows user, I'm finding it increasingly harder to justify using the OS. Pretty much every single software I use to get my work done works in my browser. The only software that runs natively is Ableton, which works perhaps even better on Mac. If I haven't switched, it's simply because of laziness: it would be too much of a hassle to copy all my samples to another device and reinstall a…

The bigger challenge, if you're a long time Windows user, will be overcoming your own muscle memory. Apple's keyboard layout and shortcuts are similar but different enough to cause problems. It can be quite distracting for instance if you're in the zone and hit the shortcut to replace some text, and then suddenly every window on your desktop disappears!
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