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Ok, lets say it didn't take 5 minutes. Lets say it took 3 hours for a designer to make the favicon pixel by pixel, and 1 hour for a developer to upload the favi

by axiom 16y ago

Ok, lets say it didn't take 5 minutes. Lets say it took 3 hours for a designer to make the favicon pixel by pixel, and 1 hour for a developer to upload the favicon to the server (maybe he only has one arm or something, I don't know, bare with me.) That's ~$230/hr. Really, you can't argue that this wasn't crazy expensive. However, when it comes to government waste this is a pretty trivial example.

jrwoodruff 16y ago
Well, you forgot the 2 hour meeting to get approval of everyone involved, then the changes needed after the team weighed in, another meeting for final approval (assuming there was only one round of revisions - this is government here) and then actual implementation. You also forgot the time it took the designer to come up with the original concept - you can't just sit down and produce a production-ready favicon without knowing what it is you're drawing. So, lets call it 10 hours, roughly? So 58.50/hr...
- larrik 16y ago
  Seriously, the icon design wasn't a foregone conclusion. It could have NOT had the inverted colors. Or just had the I. Or something completely different. Plus, it wasn't an internal project. It was outsourced. That can cut productivity quite a bit.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- alexqgb 16y ago
  Bingo. And there's no mention of the half dozen favicons the designer had to come up with in order to get one through all the layers of approval involved.
- axiom 16y ago
  I dunno, if a company we hired on contract pulled shit like that we'd fire their ass exactly 3 minutes after the first invoice arrived (and of course we would require weekly invoices with written notice if there was deviation from the original budget.) The UK government has no such contraints of course.
larrik 16y ago
I'm going to assume ~$230/hour includes some pounds-to-dollars conversion I'm not going to do the math to check. $230/hr is not crazy expensive. It really isn't. At my last job we charged $160/hr for things like "standing around while the phone company is there", or setting up a Dell computer, or sitting in meetings. The UK government isn't some ramen startup. Of course, it may be that you can't actually just FTP it to the server. At my current employer, you can't put ANYTHING on any of our web servers without sitting at the console. Which is an hour's drive away from my main office. Security does funny things to productivity. Who knows? (Apparently the UK government doesn't, either)
- robryan 16y ago
  Is that security practice widespread? Seems over the top, I mean a big company like Google would have as much to loose as anyone by breaches of business docs and gmail accounts and you couldn't imagine them having to be at the physical data center to deploy.
angrycoder 16y ago
You should read up on bike sheds if you don't understand how something as simple as a fav icon can turn into a 10-15 hour endeavor. Particularly when the client is a government agency or a large company. http://bikeshed.org/ http://bikeshed.org/

by axiom 16y ago

jrwoodruff 16y ago

Well, you forgot the 2 hour meeting to get approval of everyone involved, then the changes needed after the team weighed in, another meeting for final approval (assuming there was only one round of revisions - this is government here) and then actual implementation. You also forgot the time it took the designer to come up with the original concept - you can't just sit down and produce a production-ready favicon without knowing what it is you're drawing. So, lets call it 10 hours, roughly? So 58.50/hr...

larrik 16y ago
Seriously, the icon design wasn't a foregone conclusion. It could have NOT had the inverted colors. Or just had the I. Or something completely different. Plus, it wasn't an internal project. It was outsourced. That can cut productivity quite a bit.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
alexqgb 16y ago
Bingo. And there's no mention of the half dozen favicons the designer had to come up with in order to get one through all the layers of approval involved.
axiom 16y ago
I dunno, if a company we hired on contract pulled shit like that we'd fire their ass exactly 3 minutes after the first invoice arrived (and of course we would require weekly invoices with written notice if there was deviation from the original budget.) The UK government has no such contraints of course.

larrik 16y ago

I'm going to assume ~$230/hour includes some pounds-to-dollars conversion I'm not going to do the math to check. $230/hr is not crazy expensive. It really isn't. At my last job we charged $160/hr for things like "standing around while the phone company is there", or setting up a Dell computer, or sitting in meetings. The UK government isn't some ramen startup. Of course, it may be that you can't actually just FTP it to the server. At my current employer, you can't put ANYTHING on any of our web servers without sitting at the console. Which is an hour's drive away from my main office. Security does funny things to productivity. Who knows? (Apparently the UK government doesn't, either)

robryan 16y ago
Is that security practice widespread? Seems over the top, I mean a big company like Google would have as much to loose as anyone by breaches of business docs and gmail accounts and you couldn't imagine them having to be at the physical data center to deploy.

angrycoder 16y ago

You should read up on bike sheds if you don't understand how something as simple as a fav icon can turn into a 10-15 hour endeavor. Particularly when the client is a government agency or a large company. http://bikeshed.org/ http://bikeshed.org/