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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)

#91

Post by marklit »

StavrosK wrote: post #7
marklit wrote: post #5

Lots of contracts in London are paying £350 a day. £350 / day * 48 working weeks of the year * 5 days a week = £84,000 / year. £55,498.64 in your pocket after tax. Compare this to ~5 - 10 years of working for peanuts in a startup hoping for an exit. Keep your eye on the clients who agree to short payment terms, forget the dreamers.

In my experience, 350 was the low end. When recruiting, we couldn't get any decent people for under 400 (and I mean decent; 350 got us a Web front end developer who didn't know CSS). 400-450 did get us amazingly knowledgeable people, though, so that extra 50 was a small price to pay.

Out of curiosity were you recruiting developers directly or going via a headhunter or agency? £350 that I see a lot is what's offered from headhunter emails filling my inbox everyday. They take a large margin for themselves as a finders fee.

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

#92

Post by davidjnelson »

jrogers65 wrote: post #54
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…

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…

The best documentation is the code itself. Check out the book Clean Code for great details.

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

#93

Post by sopooneo »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #27

Maybe I am doing something wrong but I have never been approached by such an idea guy - the last closest was running an insurance brokerage and just got fed up with poor delivery from his current devs yet had a laundry lost of features needed in his site Maybe if you are getting approached by morons a lot you might want to review where you are hanging out - just there mus be some reason

They're not necessarily stupid, they just don't have any understanding of goes into creating software.

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

#94

Post by StavrosK »

marklit wrote: post #91
StavrosK wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, 350 was the low end. When recruiting, we couldn't get any decent people for under 400 (and I mean decent; 350 got us a Web front end developer who didn't know CSS). 400-450 did get us amazingly knowledgeable people, though, so that extra 50 was a small price to pay.

Out of curiosity were you recruiting developers directly or going via a headhunter or agency? £350 that I see a lot is what's offered from headhunter emails filling my inbox everyday. They take a large margin for themselves as a finders fee.

Yeah, it was a recruiter. They probably did inflate the prices a lot, although I think they took some days' wages as a fee or something. I can't be sure.

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

#95

Post by StavrosK »

sutro wrote: post #88

Some writers are OK with being ghostwriters, or copywriters. They can apply their craft within the confines of other people's ideas. Great writers work on their own ideas.

Ugh, what does that even mean? What's a "great" writer, other than a writer who works on his own ideas, and why can't a "great" writer be a ghostwriter? This analogy doesn't even apply here, it's just a self-congratulatory remark to make some other readers feel better about "sticking it to the man".

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

#96

Post by StavrosK »

sharkweek wrote: post #87
cheald wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the point is more to demonstrate that "Hey, what I do takes a lot of skill and expertise, it's not just something you can throw together in a weekend". If an idea guy wouldn't be willing to invest at least a year to learn how to do it themselves, the idea's probably not as great as they think it is.

I am nearing the end of a "crash course" code lesson and have no intention of creating a company on this knowledge anytime in the near future. However... I would like to start building out some of those "annoying itch" ideas I have been sitting on and feel this enables me not only to prototype those out, but also allows me to have a half-intelligent conversation about my idea with someone who is a far better dev than…

> However... I would like to start building out some of those "annoying itch" ideas I have been sitting on and feel this enables me not only to prototype those out, but also allows me to have a half-intelligent conversation about my idea with someone who is a far better dev than me.

Oh man, I can't tell you how much instant respect this would gain an "idea guy" who contacted me for development. If you've already tried to prototype your idea, it would tell me that not only are you dedicated, but you will also not underestimate my contribution to the endeavour.

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

#97

Post by caseysoftware »

jrogers65 wrote: post #25
chrisbennet wrote: post #19

"You'd be crazy to have me work on this for a few months for 50% equity when you could just spend 6-12 months yourself learning to code and doing it yourself and have 100% equity. Of course, if you don't think it is worth spending a few months of your own time why should I take a chance on it?"

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…

Acknowledging that most people won't be a very useful developer at that stage, I always propose a different approach..

I tell the person to sketch out the how a user moves through the app, what they can do where, and how it should work. I even tell them to sketch out something basic with powerpoint.

If they make it through those stages, it does two things: First, it demonstrates that they're relatively serious about the idea. More importantly, it lets them get a bunch of the oddities, inconsistencies, etc figured out before there's code involved. Making radical changes at that point is File->New.

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

#98

Post by georgemcbay »

kami8845 wrote: post #64
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…

"but equity-rich (almost infinitely so)"

This is the part about equity that is most likely to bite you in the ass if you receive equity but ultimately do not control the allocation of it. (Common for early employee or founders on the technical side of things).

Day 1: Awesome, I own 10% of this company. If it sells for millions I will make a significant amount of money!

Day 630: Due to the "almost infinite" nature of equity and dilution, I now own 0.05% of the company. If it sells for millions I will be able to buy a cup of coffee!

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

#99

Post by RyanZAG »

bbwharris wrote: post #86
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…

Having done this type of consulting myself, I could never work around the maintenance issue. You likely setup the entire system so if something goes wrong, whether its you're fault or not, you're on the line. It's all about reputation. And if you tarnish that by leaving a paid client behind when their server catches on fire, it will be remembered negatively. It's hard to do this type of contract work continuously. Yo…

Make it clear up front that you will charge for maintenance work, and if they can't afford it then it's a sad world, but you'll have to move on. You can try be nice and include free bugfixes for issues that are your fault -- this is nearly always a bad idea. You'll end up some some client that will be incredibly insistent that new features are actually bugfixes and all kinds of problems.

Always charge. People will respect you more, and any work you do for them for free will be abused. This is simple human nature - when you give away work for free, all you are creating immense confusion in the recipient. "Why did I get this for free? What's wrong with it? Is this guy so desperate?" This line of reasoning will quickly blossom in your clients mind, and before long your client will expect you to get up at 3am in the morning to add in some new feature he just dreamed up. When you refuse, his expectations of you are shattered and you will be remembered negatively - even when you just gave him free work!

Always charge. The less you need the work, the more your charge. The less you want to do the work, the more you charge. The more difficult the work is, the more you charge. No freebies, unless you make the reason extremely clear up front to prevent any confusion.

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

#100

Post by FollowSteph3 »

Another good criteria is have you done something before? Doesn't matter so much if it succeeded or not, but what you're looking for is will you follow through. Someone who has tried and put real effort, past the initial first few months, is likely to at least be worth further investigation. This little criteria removes over 99% of ideas only people
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