8 ms·

So, let's say a wildly over-staffed (for this kind of project) team of 10 programmers for a year, on an average salary of $120K. That's still only 1.2M. Let's s

So, let's say a wildly over-staffed (for this kind of project) team of 10 programmers for a year, on an average salary of $120K. That's still only 1.2M. Let's say another 800K on hardware. Does that mean the other 38M went to corporate, management, kickbacks to ensure that the right company got the contract? If that's the case, it's even more depressing if the vast majority of the money didn't even go to people who had absolutely nothing to do with the actual implementation. Can the shareholders of the NYT demand an investigation into this? Seems like this kind of ridiculous overspending should be something that would concern them.

rorrr 16y ago
You are very wrong about the size of the team that was involved. My guess would be 1) 10 to 20 developers 2) 2 to 3 sys admins 3) 10 to 30 managers 4) 15 to 20 executives, from low level, all the way to the top. 5) Outside consulting design team that billed them at $500/hour. Q: How did they get so spend that money? A: Endless meetings. Executive salaries add up very very quickly. Executives and managers absolutely loooove meetings, that's how they can pretend to do anything useful. In reality they spend hours discussing the color and the thickness of the line under the logo and bullshit each other, while developers are half-asleep from boredom or are wondering - "WTF, did this dude just discover the internet? and why is he in charge?"
- maigret 16y ago
  UX specialists and UI architects/designers discuss things like thickness of lines. Also don't discount the sheer size of their website, making "simple" changes a whole different thing than on a private small website. You also forget testers, project managers, and lawyers etc. Blaming execs and managers is just too simple I think. That would be easy to fix.
  - rorrr 16y ago
    > UX specialists and UI architects/designers discuss things like thickness of lines You wish. I'm yet to see a company where (often clueless) executives don't override decisions of professionals. I know a huge company where the CEO spent five weeks changing the curve of one of the letters in the logo, there were something like 25 iterations. Want to calculate how much that cost?
    - ThomPete 16y ago
      My guess is unfortunately zero USD. Iterations often end up costing the designers their margin. Especially if the company has a good name.
      - nuxi 16y ago
        CEO presumably spent five weeks doing something that was NOT his job, and was paid for it. I'm guessing the cost was substantial.
        ThomPete 16y ago
        That's his choice.
        lsc 16y ago
        You are assuming that positive value is generated when the CEO does things that are his job. Now, when a good CEO does his or her job, that is probably a good assumption. But a CEO who is willing to spend that much time on graphic design is not a good CEO. If he was that incompetent when it came to everything else, most likely the company was better off having him tied up on a project where he couldn't do that much damage.
        nuxi 16y ago
        Upvoted - I agree on the first part. As for his incompetence, the worst thing that a company can do is "promote" someone to a position where one "can't do much damage". It's damaging for morale of employees who are competent and hard working, but not properly rewarded for their work when compared to "non-damaging" ones.
- bigiain 16y ago
  "Q: How did they get so spend that money? A: Endless meetings." Indeed. I've worked on and managed projects where the billable hours for meetings were 2 or 3 times as many as the billable hours for development. I've also a few times worked on projects like that where as well as the client insisting 3 people from our firm attend each 1hr weekly progress phone conference, there were also multiple representatives from marketing, legal, and network ops on top of 4 or 5 stakeholders and their assistants. The specific project I'm thinking of there involved only about $12k worth of development "work". We billed ~$50k. I have no doubt the cost including internal expenses to the client for that project would have exceeded $250k and may have approached $500k. Interestingly, that client was perfectly happy with the way the project went, and we've worked for them again since then, with largely similar cost overheads. This is one of the _big_ reasons small startups can out maneuver corporations. The project could have been completed for $12k, if someone was prepared to take a risk and was prepared to accept responsibility for letting the developers run with loose specs and trust them to make decisions when appropriate and ask for guidance when needed. And that's $12k at "outsourced to competent webdev firm" rates, a lean startup with at least one good tech founder would have done it themselves over a couple of weekends or a few weeks worth of evenings. Instead big corporations involve literally dozens of highly paid middle management and somehow approve half million dollar budgets to achieve exactly the same ends, just with accountability and avenues of blame to show for the large portion of that money. (I'd love to land a similar client with a 40mil budget to "waste" this way though...)
- aeontech 16y ago
  Like I said, 10 programmers that do actual work. Even if you double that to 20 and add sysadmins, project lead, QA engineer and UX/designer, you still won't have more than 30 people, which is bigger than many startups' dev teams that build entire products rather than a single feature as in this case. The rest goes to corporate managerial overhead, which was my point. Even if I underrated the size of the team, the difference is still merely 35M vs 38M. 35M is enough to take a startup company from nothing to a world-level player with the right team.
look_lookatme 16y ago
Do you know enough about this project to say that 10 programmers is "wildly over-staffed"?
adestefan 16y ago
The costs of 10 programmers with a $120k salary is way more than $1.2M. You're forgetting to factor in employer paid taxes, benefits, and the costs associated with providing a work space.
- rhizome 16y ago
  Even with all of the overhead I doubt it's more than $2M.

rorrr 16y ago

You are very wrong about the size of the team that was involved. My guess would be 1) 10 to 20 developers 2) 2 to 3 sys admins 3) 10 to 30 managers 4) 15 to 20 executives, from low level, all the way to the top. 5) Outside consulting design team that billed them at $500/hour. Q: How did they get so spend that money? A: Endless meetings. Executive salaries add up very very quickly. Executives and managers absolutely loooove meetings, that's how they can pretend to do anything useful. In reality they spend hours discussing the color and the thickness of the line under the logo and bullshit each other, while developers are half-asleep from boredom or are wondering - "WTF, did this dude just discover the internet? and why is he in charge?"

maigret 16y ago
UX specialists and UI architects/designers discuss things like thickness of lines. Also don't discount the sheer size of their website, making "simple" changes a whole different thing than on a private small website. You also forget testers, project managers, and lawyers etc. Blaming execs and managers is just too simple I think. That would be easy to fix.
- rorrr 16y ago
  > UX specialists and UI architects/designers discuss things like thickness of lines You wish. I'm yet to see a company where (often clueless) executives don't override decisions of professionals. I know a huge company where the CEO spent five weeks changing the curve of one of the letters in the logo, there were something like 25 iterations. Want to calculate how much that cost?
  - ThomPete 16y ago
    My guess is unfortunately zero USD. Iterations often end up costing the designers their margin. Especially if the company has a good name.
    - nuxi 16y ago
      CEO presumably spent five weeks doing something that was NOT his job, and was paid for it. I'm guessing the cost was substantial.
      - ThomPete 16y ago
        That's his choice.
      - lsc 16y ago
        You are assuming that positive value is generated when the CEO does things that are his job. Now, when a good CEO does his or her job, that is probably a good assumption. But a CEO who is willing to spend that much time on graphic design is not a good CEO. If he was that incompetent when it came to everything else, most likely the company was better off having him tied up on a project where he couldn't do that much damage.
        nuxi 16y ago
        Upvoted - I agree on the first part. As for his incompetence, the worst thing that a company can do is "promote" someone to a position where one "can't do much damage". It's damaging for morale of employees who are competent and hard working, but not properly rewarded for their work when compared to "non-damaging" ones.
bigiain 16y ago
"Q: How did they get so spend that money? A: Endless meetings." Indeed. I've worked on and managed projects where the billable hours for meetings were 2 or 3 times as many as the billable hours for development. I've also a few times worked on projects like that where as well as the client insisting 3 people from our firm attend each 1hr weekly progress phone conference, there were also multiple representatives from marketing, legal, and network ops on top of 4 or 5 stakeholders and their assistants. The specific project I'm thinking of there involved only about $12k worth of development "work". We billed ~$50k. I have no doubt the cost including internal expenses to the client for that project would have exceeded $250k and may have approached $500k. Interestingly, that client was perfectly happy with the way the project went, and we've worked for them again since then, with largely similar cost overheads. This is one of the _big_ reasons small startups can out maneuver corporations. The project could have been completed for $12k, if someone was prepared to take a risk and was prepared to accept responsibility for letting the developers run with loose specs and trust them to make decisions when appropriate and ask for guidance when needed. And that's $12k at "outsourced to competent webdev firm" rates, a lean startup with at least one good tech founder would have done it themselves over a couple of weekends or a few weeks worth of evenings. Instead big corporations involve literally dozens of highly paid middle management and somehow approve half million dollar budgets to achieve exactly the same ends, just with accountability and avenues of blame to show for the large portion of that money. (I'd love to land a similar client with a 40mil budget to "waste" this way though...)
aeontech 16y ago
Like I said, 10 programmers that do actual work. Even if you double that to 20 and add sysadmins, project lead, QA engineer and UX/designer, you still won't have more than 30 people, which is bigger than many startups' dev teams that build entire products rather than a single feature as in this case. The rest goes to corporate managerial overhead, which was my point. Even if I underrated the size of the team, the difference is still merely 35M vs 38M. 35M is enough to take a startup company from nothing to a world-level player with the right team.

look_lookatme 16y ago

Do you know enough about this project to say that 10 programmers is "wildly over-staffed"?

adestefan 16y ago

The costs of 10 programmers with a $120k salary is way more than $1.2M. You're forgetting to factor in employer paid taxes, benefits, and the costs associated with providing a work space.

rhizome 16y ago
Even with all of the overhead I doubt it's more than $2M.