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Why Developers Don't Want to Work on Your Idea (2011)

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Re: Why Developers Don't Want to Work on Your Idea (2011)

#61

Post by badatmath »

sebcat wrote: post #50
badatmath wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Novice with 7 months of learning here. Quit my strategy consulting job to focus full time on learning to code, and am currently working on this project, built in Rails, on Heroku (it's all in Japanese, but the concept is similar to Hacker News/Reddit) http://www.daidake.com Is this a bad idea? Would like to hear your thoughts. I have to admit I do feel like I'm in a little bit over my head, in that once/if I start ge…

> is this a bad idea? Well, what do you bring to the table? Do Japanese people read HN or reddit, or are they hindered by the language barrier? If they are, then it's not. Damn, ideas are never bad. As long as you do stuff, it's all good.

Yeah, Japanese people are shockingly bad at English. The idea is for Japanese users that CAN read English to provide short summaries of interesting English articles. While the Japanese media is pretty open and liberal, there are still some topics of (possible)importance that never make it into the headlines there. The US media isn't necessarily great, but if you can read English, you have access to A LOT of info to form your own opinion.

Re: Why Developers Don't Want to Work on Your Idea (2011)

#62

Post by badatmath »

csgavino wrote: post #47
badatmath wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Novice with 7 months of learning here. Quit my strategy consulting job to focus full time on learning to code, and am currently working on this project, built in Rails, on Heroku (it's all in Japanese, but the concept is similar to Hacker News/Reddit) http://www.daidake.com Is this a bad idea? Would like to hear your thoughts. I have to admit I do feel like I'm in a little bit over my head, in that once/if I start ge…

Good job on learning how to program and actually releasing something! Your site looks okay but it is kinda slow. I suggest reading up on memcached (since you're using heroku).

Thanks for the feedback. I will check it out!

Re: Why Developers Don't Want to Work on Your Idea (2011)

#63

Post by kami8845 »

jasonkester wrote: post #44
kami8845 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

blah blah blah. Same contracting comparison that gets thrown into seemingly every thread. As an employee you get work guaranteed, as a freelancer you have to work for every hour of work twice (once to get it, once to actually do it). You also have to do your own taxes, basically run your own business, but with only the shitty parts of it (no potential for growth, bureaucracy, scheduling, negotiating your pay all the…

Hang on a second. Are you honestly saying that you think 350GBP/day is an unreasonably high goal for a contractor? If my math is right, that works out to about $70/hr (USD), which is well on the low side for a 1 year contract, even assuming you're out in the sticks. That's closer to what you'd expect for a day rate as a salaried employee if you have any experience. So no, you need to take on board that this is the so…

Quite a sad reality you live in. Apparently a world where the main criterion for a job is to maximize money output while minimizing time commitment.

Money doesn't motivate me. I thought it would. Made a bunch of money (much more than me or anyone I knew made) doing IM stuff. Turns out what I really wanted was interesting peers, people who I could become long-term friends with, learn from and share experiences with. Freelancing doesn't offer this, finding the right people and working with them at a company however can.

>But those same companies will happily pay market (as plenty of us can attest) if they have to.

>market

You use the word market as if you knew what it meant, but apparently you don't. Developers being happy to accept lower rates than what they could make freelancing means there's some mysterious, secret value-offering that becoming part of a team offers humans. For a lot of people that's stability. Or because becoming an employee is the "normal thing to do". For me it's much more. And I imagine for many of the most brilliant programmers who are alive today (of whom almost none earn their living as freelancers) as well.

Re: Why Developers Don't Want to Work on Your Idea (2011)

#64

Post by kami8845 »

Swizec wrote: post #55

As a guy specialising on developing MVPs for people with ideas, here is the general list of rules I use before taking on a project: 1. Are you willing to pay my normal rate? 2. If so, can you convince me the market is there and you know how to address it. 3. Can you convince me _you_ are the guy who's going to be able to bring it all together? I know that after rule 1 I shouldn't care, but with so many potential proj…

You're ignoring a powerful aspect here: Founders are cash-poor, but equity-rich (almost infinitely so).

I don't know whether you have enough money to cover your costs (I assume so, you sound quite successful), but I think it would be interesting to seek out promising founders and take a little bit of equity, instead of another "bunch of money"(tm). That increase in money is not going to significantly change your life, getting an early in at a startup might though. And in addition to that, you'll probably enjoy building that umpteenth MVP a little more if you have the feeling that the quality of your work has a potential stake in your future.

There's of course a lot of my making assumptions here, but I think it's an interesting thought to consider.

Re: Why Developers Don't Want to Work on Your Idea (2011)

#65

Post by benjamincburns »

I never thought I'd find myself repeating this.

A chicken tells a pig that they should start a restaurant together. The pig tells the chicken no. "Why?" asks the chicken. "Because you'd be involved, but I'd be committed."

Revenue share is a great idea, but there's no way I'm working on your idea for free while you just sit around and wait for me to make you money.

Re: Why Developers Don't Want to Work on Your Idea (2011)

#66

Post by analog »

kami8845 wrote: post #63
jasonkester wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hang on a second. Are you honestly saying that you think 350GBP/day is an unreasonably high goal for a contractor? If my math is right, that works out to about $70/hr (USD), which is well on the low side for a 1 year contract, even assuming you're out in the sticks. That's closer to what you'd expect for a day rate as a salaried employee if you have any experience. So no, you need to take on board that this is the so…

Quite a sad reality you live in. Apparently a world where the main criterion for a job is to maximize money output while minimizing time commitment. Money doesn't motivate me. I thought it would. Made a bunch of money (much more than me or anyone I knew made) doing IM stuff. Turns out what I really wanted was interesting peers, people who I could become long-term friends with, learn from and share experiences with. F…

You say you're 20. The reality that some of us live in is that we have families to support. Let's see how your idealism stacks up after another 20 years.

Re: Why Developers Don't Want to Work on Your Idea (2011)

#67

Post by benjamincburns »

badatmath wrote: post #42
jrogers65 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6-12 months learning how to code? Good luck building a business on top of software written by a junior-level programmer. Even better luck expanding and scaling it if/when the time comes. It takes years to reach a reasonable level of competence in software development and on the order of a decade to master it. The problem with taking people's word on how much work they do when they are involved in marketing and the so…

Novice with 7 months of learning here. Quit my strategy consulting job to focus full time on learning to code, and am currently working on this project, built in Rails, on Heroku (it's all in Japanese, but the concept is similar to Hacker News/Reddit) http://www.daidake.com Is this a bad idea? Would like to hear your thoughts. I have to admit I do feel like I'm in a little bit over my head, in that once/if I start ge…

I don't think it's a terribly bad idea. As someone said above, doing at least some of the technical legwork yourself will buy you a ton of credibility with experienced programmers when you go to hire. It often becomes somewhat insulting to developers when he/she has to argue schedule with someone with no experience. Often the client thinks it should X should take Y long, and you're telling them that X might not even be possible, but you can do X' in 4 or 10 Y. "What do you mean? You must not be as skilled as so-and-so said you are."

However if you've fought even the initial stages of the battle yourself, you understand the idea of the vision, and the reduced scope which is your next step toward the larger goal. Further, we understand that the part of the learning curve you're in right now is the steepest, and if you're willing to endure it you're either stupid or you really do believe in your business.

Re: Why Developers Don't Want to Work on Your Idea (2011)

#68

Post by jrogers65 »

badatmath wrote: post #58
jrogers65 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate that resources are always tight in these situations so I would recommend that you hire an experienced developer to review your code. It's cheaper than hiring someone full time and you should still be able to get a lot of value out of it. They will know about nuances and gotchas that only years of working on code can teach. Addressing those early rather than late is probably a good idea. A cheaper (no mon…

Thanks. Really appreciate the feedback. It's so tempting to keep build quick and sloppy, but I know I need to be more diligent with testing and documenting. I'm setting a relatively low target number of users to acquire just to make sure this idea has a chance, before bringing on a developer. Very broad question, but how does one find an experienced developer? I live in New York, but have zero tech connections.

> It's so tempting to keep build quick and sloppy

That's normal when you're starting out. The only reason more experienced developers do not give into this impulse is because they've learned of the consequences through painful experience.

I would recommend looking at the people who contribute to Rails, Ruby and related projects on Github. The core developers will be far too expensive but people who throw some code out every so often (assuming that their pull requests are usually accepted and nobody is shouting at them in the comments) will likely know their stuff and may have reasonable prices.

IRC channels on Freenode such as #ruby and #rubyonrails will likely prove useful too. Look out for people who answer a lot of questions (and get them right). One strategy is to try to design a solution for a feature by yourself, then summarise the design (i.e. show the relevant code snippets) in a Github Gist or pastebin page and ask for feedback. If there are any glaring faults or simply better ways to achieve the result then they will be pointed out to you.

Re: Why Developers Don't Want to Work on Your Idea (2011)

#69

Post by kami8845 »

analog wrote: post #66
kami8845 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a sad reality you live in. Apparently a world where the main criterion for a job is to maximize money output while minimizing time commitment. Money doesn't motivate me. I thought it would. Made a bunch of money (much more than me or anyone I knew made) doing IM stuff. Turns out what I really wanted was interesting peers, people who I could become long-term friends with, learn from and share experiences with. F…

You say you're 20. The reality that some of us live in is that we have families to support. Let's see how your idealism stacks up after another 20 years.

I don't think what I've laid out is unrealistic. I'm young that's true. Though I still hope that in 20 years I have a job that I love and want to spend a lot of time at. I might also have other things I want to spend time on, but I don't want to sacrifice in my work situation in order to do that (which I interpret freelancing to be). Hopefully I'll be careful enough not to have kids without significant savings (though I currently don't think kids are a great deal bang for your buck (time, commitment, opportunity cost) :) )

Re: Why Developers Don't Want to Work on Your Idea (2011)

#70

Post by lprubin »

Swizec wrote: post #55

As a guy specialising on developing MVPs for people with ideas, here is the general list of rules I use before taking on a project: 1. Are you willing to pay my normal rate? 2. If so, can you convince me the market is there and you know how to address it. 3. Can you convince me _you_ are the guy who's going to be able to bring it all together? I know that after rule 1 I shouldn't care, but with so many potential proj…

The other reason to choose projects that appear to have a decent chance of success is that the longer the project goes, the more work you'll have without having to go through the hassle of finding a new client, vetting their idea, doing the contract back and forth, doing the negotiating, and establishing a good working relationship.

There is also the excellent resume and street cred of working on a successful startup, possibly with name recognition, vs a 'failed' one.

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