Why Developers Don't Want to Work on Your Idea (2011) • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by YZF » Sun, Jan 20, 2013, 12:54 AM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #98

kami8845 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you go for this sort of deal you should always have some anti-dilution protection. Otherwise as is pointed out the equity is essentially worthless. You can use some sort of full ratchet clause or ensure the majority shareholder can not issue more shares (though some special resolution requirement). You'll need a lawyer...

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

#112

Post by z-factor » Sun, Jan 20, 2013, 5:41 AM UTC

dtkuhn wrote: post #108

Swizec wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually also fix MVPs when they start breaking :) Honestly, I just find working with startups and small companies in general to be more interesting, even though there is usually slightly less money involved. I got into this type of work by hanging around Hacker News and writing blogposts aimed at a hackerpreneur auidence. It's amazing how many great projects you can attract if your writing is half decent and you h…

I'm curious as to why the conversation about compensation for work done for "non-technical" upstarts is almost always framed as a binary "payment in equity vs cash" issue. Seems like there would be a huge market for MVP development by developers with a hybrid compensation model. (Maybe this is already common?) For instance, a developer could quote Price X to non-technical co-founders to develop a simple, proof-of-con…

I asked something similar recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5039241

That got zero offers.

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

#113

Post by jrogers65 » Sun, Jan 20, 2013, 10:10 AM UTC

davidjnelson wrote: post #92

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…

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

I heartily agree that good code makes sense on it's own.

One of the things which good code and inline documentation (comments) do not communicate very well is a high level overview of the architecture of the application. In my opinion, it is better to describe such things using external documents and diagrams.

The same goes for the deployment procedures and the way the servers are laid out as well as dependencies. For example, the place I'm currently at had no documentation what-so-ever for the libraries and modules necessary to run the in-house web application and, consequently, it took us more time than it should have to figure out what needed to be installed when we moved to a new server.

Thanks for the book recommendation, seems like a great one judging by the reviews. It's always useful to learn more - will add it to my 'to read' list.

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

#114

Post by radio4fan » Sun, Jan 20, 2013, 11:09 AM UTC

gesman wrote: post #75

The client who tries to give his own clueless estimate of complexity of the job - automatically gets into no-reply/spam list: "...and i think it's not that complicated" "...it shouldn't take more than ... to complete" "...Joe Blow said it's simple and let's assume that"

IME, that's pretty much all of them.

But then I think that nearly everyone has a tendency to think that anything they don't fully understand must be simple.

You don't have to hang around here or on Slashdot for long to see that programmers suffer from this too...