611–620 of 789 posts
Good God, that logo would be $50 on Fiverr, those illustrations would be $10 each, and that landing page would be 2 hours with bootstrap. This is how you turn $500 worth of work into $45,000 worth of billing.
Lots of mistakes made on both sides but hourly billing itself was a major contributor that neither party even mentioned in the postmortem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I hate all these websites that keep A/B testing. Just when I get used to a layout, they pull out a new design, completely disorienting me.
> Just when I get used to a layout, they pull out a new design, completely disorienting me. Honestly, I feel like the only way of working around this is having multiple different interface options available. For example, the new Reddit look is more app-like and certainly has improvements to the user profile pages and whatnot. Yet for certain types of browsing content, or wanting to do it without your browser slowing…
https://i.reddit.com/Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think you're attributing malice to what was more than likely routine mismanagement. I wouldn't call it mismanagement. Many agencies thrive despite regularly delivering these types of experiences. It's a conscious choice they can easily rationalize because of the money. This agency turned a one off $7k job into $46k by smooth talking and scope creeping an actual developer . I'm sure they're absolutely killing it d…
I'm sure some do have that attitude but I don't believe, for most, that they're choosing to operate that way. TinyPilot is clearly successful and growing. Any smart agency would nurture that relationship, deliver a great product, and secure an ongoing relationship. By contrast, there's a huge amount of reputational risk in allowing things to spiral. They've walked away with more today but imagine for a moment the dam…
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This is why I still like Agile and Scrum, as much as other devs might hate it. “Yeah I want REAL deliverables after the first or second week”. Keeps me honest. And will keep me from working with architecture astronauts don’t really deliver anything but hot air and build ultra-extensible structures that are actually impossible to extend beyond the fantasy world of their maker. Or the equivalent for designers.
Agile and scrum are in practice such nebulous terms that while I don’t doubt that you have had good experience with the particular version of these concepts that you yourself use, the agency could well consider itself to be using the same concepts - yet here we are. The older I get, the more I come to understand that the problem with projects is people, not methodology. 30% of IT projects still fail, despite “agile”…
As a small business owner myself, this resonates. I would love to be in a position to be able to confidently pay money to other professionals to make problems go away. Unfortunately, my overall experience has been that hiring any “expert” in a field that I am not also an expert in has a 50% chance of working, and a 50% chance of blowing up in my face and creating more problems. I recently attempted to get a new accou…
If it’s anything like the market for home services, the middleman service will be even worse than dealing with vendors directly: a middleman adding a layer of indirection but little value.
You know how, during a big programming project, you have to keep the devs from going "this codebase has a lot of technical debt, let's rebuild the whole thing using Rust and Kubernetes and Deno and move the hosting to Azure and switch databases and use microservices and..."? Designers are exactly the same way. Just as technical fiddling is fun and interesting, making new designs from scratch is just as fun and intere…
Also known as the "oh look, a shiny thing" development paradigm.
You should read the other Hertz story. You'll feel much better. :)
Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32184183 - July 2022 (290 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32179563&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32179563&p=3
I just mention this because for a thread this large, it is unusually good. (And yes, we're still going to solve this paging business and then there won't be any more of these annoying notices.)