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The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

kitze.io

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Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#141

Post by pantulis »

thekitze wrote: post #69

Author here! I need to update this article. Years later, I actually got motivated by the comments on HN (whenever this gets posted). P People are always like "why don't you just ship your app?" ... so I did! I'm happy I went through with and it's way WAY better than any competitor in this category Check it out at https://benji.so (landing page is still w.i.p)

I just tried it and the detected timezone for me is called:

"Africa/Ceuta (Romance Standard Time) (UTC+01:00) Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris"

While the assigned delta with GMT is correct, this is confusing as hell because neither Brussels, Copenhaguen, Madrid or Paris are in Africa. You may want to take a look at the TZ info you are using.

EDIT: See comment below, this is not an issue.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#142

Post by fabioborellini »

achenet wrote: post #123
fabioborellini wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that depends on the job market you're working on. In some countries salaries are more affected by personal performance than in others. My first job as a developer made me work around the clock, day and night, for a below average (nationwide compared) salary. And I got yelled at. Since I didn't have enough work experience, my applications weren't responded to. There were no ways to improve conditions without cha…

I'm sorry to hear that. I had a similarly shitty first job, although I was lucky to be in France, which was very strict worker protection laws, so "working day and night" was 'only' 10 hour days. However, after like 8 months there I was able to get another job - it doesn't take much experience for recruiters to start reaching out on LinkedIn aparantly.

We have the laws in place in Finland, too, but they aren't enforced in practice. So, people who refuse to obey them get an advantage against people with integrity.

The workers protection authorities are not resourced to do any individual checkups, and going to court against a company would take years and possibly leads to lifetime in debt. So the practical way to resolve this is to change companies.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#143

Post by jezek2 »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #106

I'm expecting to experience this any day now. I've experienced it before, seeing people make hundreds of millions of dollars on an idea I'd already built (and my employer had fumbled the marketing of) and was actively working to resurrect... but couldn't figure out how to "monetize." Currently my problem is being a one-man band. I've realized I can't "just ship" a product that relies on a hand-rolled user-authorizati…

> I've realized I can't "just ship" a product that relies on a hand-rolled user-authorization scheme that I create with very little experience.

Time to ship and get the experience :) It is probably not that bad as you think it is. You can also ask others if they see any obvious security/cryptography fails and you would do better than most including big companies...

> So now I've interrupted my whole project to learn Supabase and oh yeah, containers... because I've never used those either and as far as I can tell I'd better use those for deployment and scalability.

Please don't. Leave it for later if it is truly needed. You can ship without. Don't be lured to the clouds, they're too expensive and you will need to learn and change a lot.

Instead use VPSes and/or dedicated servers from cheap providers such as OVH/Hetzner. Just running your server app on a normal Linux VM is a way simpler than any cloud solution. It can also handle quite a lot, it might surprise you. And you wouldn't get insane invoices for 10-100x overpriced traffic that the clouds have and that kills many ideas even when it would make sense to do them in the cloud otherwise.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#144

Post by throwaway84751 »

Culonavirus wrote: post #14

There's massive caveat with all of these "and then the story ends because we didn't just ship it :(" stories: sometimes the value of the "app" you're working on is in the technical details that cannot really be "hastened" and you can't "just ship it". Also, and this is something a lot of the managerial class people don't want to hear: Your job as a sw engineer/architect is to resist the "just ship it" pressure from t…

I was one of the first employees in a startup, and if I hadn't made compromises the company would probably not exist today. Your approach only works for big established companies where your team has limited impact on the results.

For small and medium sized companies you definitely need to make compromises. It is part of your job as a professional to make choices that leads to the best business outcome.

Unfortunately a lot of developers don't have a connection to the business side, because they are "protected" by several layers of management, PMs and designers that interact with the business on their behalf.

Getting a product out quickly means that you also get feedback earlier. This is not only good for business, but it is also an opportunity to evaluate your implementation to see if it matches your assumptions. In my experience this causes less stress compared to rolling out a "perfect" solution that has to be rewritten while under pressure.

My job as a developer at my current workplace is to reduce complexity and get the PM and designers to cut down their initial plans to a minimum. It makes arbitrary deadlines less stressful and any delays will not have the same impact.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#145

Post by dgb23 »

saulpw wrote: post #15
ggeorgovassilis wrote: post #6

> so I started getting suspicious if someone actually shared the video of my app with these people because they were solving literally the same problem I once met a guy who had a good idea about an app, something that became fairly mainstream two years later. He asked me to code the app for free and we'd share revenues. When asked what his contribution would be, he offered to "run" the company and otherwise his 50% w…

I mean handling sales + marketing + accounting and everything else required to run a company is worth 50% (maybe more). But of course while you were probably competent enough to "code it up", odds are he wasn't competent to "run the company".

Administrative work should probably not exceed 10% of the budget, especially in a small company, where the advantage is to have less requirements in that area.

Marketing and sales, it depends on what you sell to whom. Let’s say 10-20%.

Then there’s a grey area. Obviously there needs to be a feedback loop between clients, development and business. If the business/idea guy facilitates a lot of this and is mostly responsible to maintain the relationships, then he is part of development. So another 10-20% give or take.

That 50% number seems kind of fair. Ultimately it implies that both are putting in the same time and effort.

If the business guy is getting overwhelmed, the developer guy can automate things, talk to clients, write pretty documents for clients or take on some admin tasks.

If the developer guy is overwhelmed then the business guy can simplify requirements negotiate deadlines, do manual testing and feedback, organize tasks and so on.

What I‘m trying to say is that 50% might be more of a social contract rather than an a priori, objective assessment of value.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#146

Post by torlok »

Not the best example of "just ship it". The thing about these productivity apps (TODO, habit tracking, spending tracking, journaling, workout planning etc.) is that lots of people have these ideas independently. You can't imagine how clever I felt when I thought of the idea of an app that helps you keep track of your expenses. Then I checked the Play Store. KRAZAM even made fun of it the "The Hustle" video 5 years ago.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#147

Post by JacobThreeThree »

fabioborellini wrote: post #140
freilanzer wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get a salary for doing the expected work, not extraordinary work.

Exactly. Do the expected work well, but don't sacrifice yourself so that other people can use, abuse and eventually desert you.

Having the interests of the bottom line of the business in mind does not equate to sacrificing yourself.

Do what's expected in the interests of the business, not in pursuit of some "great software" ideal.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#148

Post by realharo »

torlok wrote: post #146

Not the best example of "just ship it". The thing about these productivity apps (TODO, habit tracking, spending tracking, journaling, workout planning etc.) is that lots of people have these ideas independently. You can't imagine how clever I felt when I thought of the idea of an app that helps you keep track of your expenses. Then I checked the Play Store. KRAZAM even made fun of it the "The Hustle" video 5 years ag…

Yeah, this is probably the most overdone app category in the history of overdone app categories.

That's not to say that a new twist on it can't be successful (most successful things aren't entirely original), but if you're worrying about someone releasing their version earlier and beating you, just take a look around.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#149

Post by ggeorgovassilis »

silisili wrote: post #56
jaggederest wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you any one of 3 or 4 ideas right now, if you want them. They're ideas I'd develop if I had the time, energy and brainpower. I've got personal connections for you too, if you want them, people who need the product. I won't even ask 50%, heck, 5% sounds fine by me. My experience has been that, while that is useful, it's by no means sufficient to lead to a complete and useful tool. But I'd absolutely take tha…

The ideas are important, but remember the idea guy also was to run the company. That's a ton of work, too. In any event, while I appreciate the offer, I'm now too old and domesticated to work on it. I guess my comment should have said I'd have loved to met someone like that in my early 20s, when I had more free time and my brain worked better :).

> but remember the idea guy also was to run the company

Company of 2 where neither receives a salary.

> That's a ton of work, too.

In this case, I really, really don't think so.

Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

#150

Post by piva00 »

b112 wrote: post #132
achenet wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that scene from Office Space where he talks about "I do just enough not to get fired" may be relevant here. There is something to be said for 'if you're going to be a rational economic actor and you have a salaried job, the optimal strategy is finish your job's tasks as fast as possible and work on a personal project which you control the upside to with all your extra energy'. From a purely economic point of view, sp…

No, Office Space depicted a horrible office environment, most are not such. And minimalist work ethic is a poor one, regardless of hand wavy, trumped up, rationalizations.

> And minimalist work ethic is a poor one, regardless of hand wavy, trumped up, rationalizations.

That's a very protestant work ethic worldview. Doing what is expected from what you're being paid in the best way possible is not a poor work ethic, it's a pretty rational one.

The other side of it where one always strive to do more, to go above and beyond what you're being compensated for, and so forth can also be a quite poor one. God is not going to give you extra points, for some people doing their best work at current expectations is good enough, no need to spend more energy than required on a job, there's more to life than working and accumulating.

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