31–40 of 135 posts
Of course, the reality is usually exactly opposite.
Enterprises want to move fast, if they can, but they can't because of the mistakes they've done in the past were covered with more processes to make sure that 1) it didn't happen again and 2) if it happened, we can blame the process.
Sometime engineers don't understand 2 facts:
1) You will get fired if you made mistakes
2) You will make mistakes
So people tend to hide and blame "processes" to avoid firing.
CEOs are cold blooded firing squad. Just like "Businesses". What matters are profits.
Business people will wear a very thick layer of skin and try to pull unimaginably stupid statements to push the price down ranging from "I thought Facebook was done in a weekend" to "It shouldn't take a day or two to fix a 'simple' Database issue. You just go there and change the data"
Please raise your hand if you're approached by on a weekly/monthly basis by some bright-eyed, overly optimistic, non-technical person who wants you to build them an "app", of any kind, for the quoted price of somewhere between $10K - $20K. That's the price of a demo.
Sorry, but I think you're being a little overly dramatic. I'm relatively new to iOS development (just over a year of doing it full-time) and I've built quite a few apps for clients for <$10k and for somewhere between $10k and $20k. There is a LONG list of apps that can be delivered in 100-150 hours. At $95-125 / hr, that puts you solidly in the $10k - $20k range.
Once you start having to send data in the opposite direction and keep it in sync, however, you'll quickly find yourself spending far longer than 150 hours.
ios is a lot of work, programming in general is a lot of work. It is 2012 not 1992, business people in all fields should know programming is not cheap. Business people who do not do the research, don't bother with them. Avoid them at all cost. I've learn the best clients are the ones who value your work and are willing to pay for it. Their is a shortage of great programmers.
> It is 2012 not 1992 On the other hand, think of what you could accomplish with a weekend of work in 1992 and compare that to 2012. Our abilities as developers/designers/etc are vastly improved due to improved infrastructure, tools, communications, resources, etc. You could build a distributed photo hosting and viewing application back in 1992. But you'd probably be writing it in C++ and it might take you a long tim…
You can now throw together a photo-hosting and viewing application in a couple of days. But that doesn't necessarily yield a site that runs itself. Teaching the customer to use the code still takes about the same amount of time. Editing the theme over and over again, iterating a design cycle that incorporates emails and meetings between you and the customer and the designer, still takes about the same amount of time. The process of moderating the uploaded photos to screen out the spam and porn still takes about the same amount of time. Usability testing still takes the same amount of time.
(And even in the enlightened year of 2012 there are still standard things that all sites could use, like proper reverse-proxy caching and solid backups, that over half the Wordpress blogs on earth seem to be lacking. Apparently we're not even done automating the things that could be automated.)
The other problem is that if the customer steps off the well-worn path they will fall into a very deep pit lined with invoices. If Wordpress does it out of the box, it's cheap. If Wordpress almost does it out of the box but it requires even the smallest amount of custom coding, it's expensive. And knowing what things are expensive and what are standard requires skills that customers don't have, so they have to pay a programmer to advise them, and that is itself inefficient and expensive...
I disagree. Yes, it's nice to have everything in hand when you start, but I've built multiple apps concurrently with the backend development. The trick is to isolate your networking in the model layer (a good practice regardless of whether or not the API is already done). This allows you to stub or use dummy data until things come online.
This is a general problem with custom software, not just iOS apps. Most businesses outside major corporations didn't start commissioning custom software until the rise of the commercial use of the internet in the late '90s, when all kinds of small and medium sized businesses wanted their own website. Websites were relatively simple back then, and the people willing and able to make them cheap. Hell, even though I was…
Even friends and family of mine will still ask me, "can you come over and fix our computer?" It sounds like a simple request -- partially driven be a general phobia of trying things out themselves -- but it's really not okay. I'm really busy. Maybe I can do something that they can't, but they could also pay someone to do it. Unfortunately, they usually think the price is "too high;" however, if I asked them to come over and mow my lawn because I think the landscaper's price is too high, they would obviously balk.
I'm not sure what the solution is, except you shouldn't low ball -- ever. For a while, I thought I had found the answer by immediately saying something like, "I expect $120 per hour on this software project." I thought it filtered out a lot of clients who didn't "get" that I was doing something valuable...
...then I realized they then try to manage the price by claiming -- ignorantly -- that their requirements do not justify X hours.
ios is a lot of work, programming in general is a lot of work. It is 2012 not 1992, business people in all fields should know programming is not cheap. Business people who do not do the research, don't bother with them. Avoid them at all cost. I've learn the best clients are the ones who value your work and are willing to pay for it. Their is a shortage of great programmers.
> It is 2012 not 1992 On the other hand, think of what you could accomplish with a weekend of work in 1992 and compare that to 2012. Our abilities as developers/designers/etc are vastly improved due to improved infrastructure, tools, communications, resources, etc. You could build a distributed photo hosting and viewing application back in 1992. But you'd probably be writing it in C++ and it might take you a long tim…
ios is a lot of work, programming in general is a lot of work. It is 2012 not 1992, business people in all fields should know programming is not cheap. Business people who do not do the research, don't bother with them. Avoid them at all cost. I've learn the best clients are the ones who value your work and are willing to pay for it. Their is a shortage of great programmers.
> It is 2012 not 1992 On the other hand, think of what you could accomplish with a weekend of work in 1992 and compare that to 2012. Our abilities as developers/designers/etc are vastly improved due to improved infrastructure, tools, communications, resources, etc. You could build a distributed photo hosting and viewing application back in 1992. But you'd probably be writing it in C++ and it might take you a long tim…
C is still necessary for a lot of people at scale.
This is a general problem with custom software, not just iOS apps. Most businesses outside major corporations didn't start commissioning custom software until the rise of the commercial use of the internet in the late '90s, when all kinds of small and medium sized businesses wanted their own website. Websites were relatively simple back then, and the people willing and able to make them cheap. Hell, even though I was…
There are 2 points we also have to consider when specifically talking about the custom development market, one is that advertising development houses are not helping the issue by putting out teaser ads like Get your iPhone app idea built for $5000 . It sets pricetags in peoples minds that are unrealistic. When you get down to the fine print, if the app requires communicating to REST service or design work that number…
Plus, these often turn out to be not particularly desirable clients that take up a lot of time, and there isn't sufficient margin on simple WordPress jobs to give such clients the same amount of attention as on major custom projects. It's very hard to make these clients happy with off-the-shelf solutions yet still make a bit of profit.
COTS helps, but it doesn't cover the gap between client expectations and reality. It's more of a "better-than-nothing" solution.
And don't even get me started on the cost of maintenance and upgrades. You don't want to have a few dozen outdated leaky WordPress sites in your portfolio, let alone a hacked site associated with your name.
This is completely false. Only a decent iOS app takes a lot of work. A crappy one can be done very quickly and cheaply.
I think it's a safe assumption to make that the author was talking about building high quality apps that one can be proud of.
And that's the problem right there. The developer is not being paid to do that, they are paid to finish the app that was asked for as quickly and cheaply as possible, at least from the client's perspective. Of course they want a high quality app, but are not willing to pay the price, so most development ends up being shovelware. But it is work, just not the most glamorous work that one can dream of.