4 ms·

Quit your job, hire your non-technical friends. Train them up and run your consultancy that can beat everyone on price and is at least as good. Riches await. U

by arjie 10y ago

Quit your job, hire your non-technical friends. Train them up and run your consultancy that can beat everyone on price and is at least as good. Riches await. Use the fact that you have the experience to sell the consultancy. Then use your army of once non-technical friends as your code farm. You can pay them less than market (since they were otherwise making nothing) and you can charge market. You're promising an easy market opportunity. And that always raises the question, "If it's so easy, why aren't you doing it?"

crdoconnor 10y ago
Probably because you'll be undercut by a company that doesn't need to invest in training because they will outsource or hire an immigrant. And most people don't have the access to capital to start a business.
glangdale 10y ago
... because his "once non-technical friends", after he trains them up, will either have to be paid market rate or will eventually jump ship to someone who does? This is a bit simplified (perhaps these guys will be grateful enough to stick around for a while, and not act like Homo Economicus). You also can't charge full market rate if you are using the equivalent of apprentices/journeymen to do the work. It's the classic problem of training.
- zxcmx 10y ago
  So the way a company charges market rate for juniors varies by industry. In the trades, they generally get apprentices to do work at full chargeout (with guidance) with final signoff from certified person. In consulting (IT, law, legal) you can either have tiered rates based on seniority of resource or a mixture of experience types doing "flat rate" job.
  - taneq 10y ago
    > In the trades, they generally get apprentices to do work at full chargeout (with guidance) with final signoff from certified person. And this is why I generally do the work myself rather than getting a tradie in. If I want someone inexperienced to give it a go and probably screw up, I'll screw it up myself on a Saturday afternoon rather than paying $120/hr for someone else to screw it up. At least after that I know how to fix it next time.
CuriouslyC 10y ago
Not everyone is motivated by more money. I like what I do, I have great work-life balance, and I get paid enough that I don't have to think about money. I wouldn't take a stressful job that I didn't enjoy doing for anything short of an obscene salary that allowed me to "retire" in 3-4 years.
phkahler 10y ago
>> Quit your job, hire your non-technical friends. Hiring a bunch of inexperienced people is not a good idea. Having larger companies sprinkle them around the workforce is better. Also, larger companies are more likely to need enough people to have a regular training program.
manquer 10y ago
There are people trying to solve the problems. zoho is well known in the Indian startup space for successful lly doing it https//m.rediff.com/business/report/pix-tech-zohos-success-thanks-to-college-dropouts-and-high-school-grads/20141203.htm
pascalxus 10y ago
Because, having access to cheaper labor isn't a competitive advantage when it comes to software companies. There's already such a vast oversupply of labor, it doesn't help companies if they have even more labor. Unlike other industries, in software, there are much larger factors to success than access to cheaper labor.
tomc1985 10y ago
Because, honestly, I am not so sure one can just be trained to be a good developer. There has to be some level of self-interest to hit the kind of performance levels one needs with a small team. A worry about a lot of the people that are just joining the technical scene; they're entering a world where computing has been abstracted so far away from the actual hardware that many of them think the only way forward is to string together plugins (not that that's a particularly new phenomenon) and cloud services. But for sales, or stocking a warehouse, or operations, or managing a team? Hell yeah I'd hire some of these folks. If only I had a business that needed that kind of staffing...

by arjie 10y ago

crdoconnor 10y ago

Probably because you'll be undercut by a company that doesn't need to invest in training because they will outsource or hire an immigrant. And most people don't have the access to capital to start a business.

glangdale 10y ago

... because his "once non-technical friends", after he trains them up, will either have to be paid market rate or will eventually jump ship to someone who does? This is a bit simplified (perhaps these guys will be grateful enough to stick around for a while, and not act like Homo Economicus). You also can't charge full market rate if you are using the equivalent of apprentices/journeymen to do the work. It's the classic problem of training.

zxcmx 10y ago
So the way a company charges market rate for juniors varies by industry. In the trades, they generally get apprentices to do work at full chargeout (with guidance) with final signoff from certified person. In consulting (IT, law, legal) you can either have tiered rates based on seniority of resource or a mixture of experience types doing "flat rate" job.
- taneq 10y ago
  > In the trades, they generally get apprentices to do work at full chargeout (with guidance) with final signoff from certified person. And this is why I generally do the work myself rather than getting a tradie in. If I want someone inexperienced to give it a go and probably screw up, I'll screw it up myself on a Saturday afternoon rather than paying $120/hr for someone else to screw it up. At least after that I know how to fix it next time.

CuriouslyC 10y ago

Not everyone is motivated by more money. I like what I do, I have great work-life balance, and I get paid enough that I don't have to think about money. I wouldn't take a stressful job that I didn't enjoy doing for anything short of an obscene salary that allowed me to "retire" in 3-4 years.

phkahler 10y ago

>> Quit your job, hire your non-technical friends. Hiring a bunch of inexperienced people is not a good idea. Having larger companies sprinkle them around the workforce is better. Also, larger companies are more likely to need enough people to have a regular training program.

manquer 10y ago

There are people trying to solve the problems. zoho is well known in the Indian startup space for successful lly doing it https//m.rediff.com/business/report/pix-tech-zohos-success-thanks-to-college-dropouts-and-high-school-grads/20141203.htm

pascalxus 10y ago

Because, having access to cheaper labor isn't a competitive advantage when it comes to software companies. There's already such a vast oversupply of labor, it doesn't help companies if they have even more labor. Unlike other industries, in software, there are much larger factors to success than access to cheaper labor.

tomc1985 10y ago

Because, honestly, I am not so sure one can just be trained to be a good developer. There has to be some level of self-interest to hit the kind of performance levels one needs with a small team. A worry about a lot of the people that are just joining the technical scene; they're entering a world where computing has been abstracted so far away from the actual hardware that many of them think the only way forward is to string together plugins (not that that's a particularly new phenomenon) and cloud services. But for sales, or stocking a warehouse, or operations, or managing a team? Hell yeah I'd hire some of these folks. If only I had a business that needed that kind of staffing...