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Totally agree. Some engineers love to say "I can build this over a weekend". But the main cost is almost always on the maintenance side. I forgot where I saw

by wenbin 6y ago

Totally agree. Some engineers love to say "I can build this over a weekend". But the main cost is almost always on the maintenance side. I forgot where I saw this number - in the entire lifecycle of a piece of software, (on average) maintenance cost is at least 8x of the initial dev cost. Yes, buying a solution also costs time (and $$$) to integrate and maintain, e.g., using a 3rd party API - time to write code, time to set up monitoring / alerting, error handling... There are always exceptions, edge cases, special situations... But in general there are fewer and fewer things that a web company needs to build from scratch. It takes less engineering time to launch a web product than before, thanks to all those out of box solutions, e.g., SaaS, apis... I like building a software/web business today than 10 years ago :) One-person (or tiny team) web businesses will be very common (I'm running one [1]), and running an API business is not bad because it actually saves customers time & money(vs building one in-house) [2] thus they are willing to pay a small fee (compared with hiring one or more full-time engineers). [1] https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology-behind-a-one-person-23/ https://www.listennotes.com/blog/the-boring-technology-behin... [2] https://www.listennotes.com/blog/how-i-accidentally-built-a-podcast-api-business-46/ https://www.listennotes.com/blog/how-i-accidentally-built-a-...

satyrnein 6y ago
I think "maintenance" somewhat mischaracterizes it. In my experience, it's often that an engineer can build the typical use case over a weekend, but will have to continue pouring in more dev time while it's in production to handle a huge number of edge cases that weren't properly handled originally. That work is only "maintenance" because you already claimed the work was completed, and finance has it marked as having been put into service, so you can't capitalize further costs against it.
- wenbin 6y ago
  Yea, in software development, it’s always work in progress. There’s not a clear finish line. The word “maintenance” can’t perfectly capture the meaning of all the continuous development, small incremental improvements, bug fixes, operational tasks...

by wenbin 6y ago

satyrnein 6y ago

I think "maintenance" somewhat mischaracterizes it. In my experience, it's often that an engineer can build the typical use case over a weekend, but will have to continue pouring in more dev time while it's in production to handle a huge number of edge cases that weren't properly handled originally. That work is only "maintenance" because you already claimed the work was completed, and finance has it marked as having been put into service, so you can't capitalize further costs against it.

wenbin 6y ago
Yea, in software development, it’s always work in progress. There’s not a clear finish line. The word “maintenance” can’t perfectly capture the meaning of all the continuous development, small incremental improvements, bug fixes, operational tasks...