3 ms·

The best way to do it is to make a modular design and hire people to work on it. Every day, you review the code they wrote for an hour. Otherwise you will hardl

The best way to do it is to make a modular design and hire people to work on it. Every day, you review the code they wrote for an hour. Otherwise you will hardly have the time for work, startup AND wife. Plan carefully, use the money from your job to create your idea and then launch small.

wlievens 18y ago
Usually, the reason for staying at your full-time job while working on your project in your free time is that you don't want to take the financial risk of going full time on the project. I find it hard to believe why you'd rather stay employed yet use that money to pay others to work on your project.
- maxklein 18y ago
  You will hire cheap programmers from abroad who will work for a fraction of your salary. For example, you earn $3000 a month and spend $600 a month on your startup. You still have enough and more left over.
  - jauco 18y ago
    You probably shouldn't hire extremely cheap programmers if you want a product that, besides barely functioning, is also extensible and scalable. No matter what country your programmers are from, if they have spent enough time working on various projects to know what they're doing, they probably also know what they're worth.
    - maxklein 18y ago
      If you spend an hour every day reviewing the code and making design decisions, you could very well hire monkeys and they would come up with good code. You have to micromanage the code to get good results.
      - alex_c 18y ago
        I'm not the one who modded you down, but... I'm having trouble seeing how this would work. What do you do if the code isn't up to par? Are you willing to basically pay - with both cash and time - for the privilege of educating the programmers you're using until they're up to your standards? Or to throw away their work and look for better programmers, possibly ad infinitum? Rewrite parts of the code yourself? I haven't outsourced any projects so far. I have, however, worked on a project launched with an off-the-shelf script - it definitely saved time and effort upfront, but the code is far from great, so it's been more frustrating over time. I still haven't decided whether the tradeoff was worth it. Have you actually used this strategy yourself, and if so, how did you make it work?
        maxklein 18y ago
        What I do is this: model the part of the project you want with uml and write the function names. You solve the bulk of the design issues and all the coder has to do is fill in the functions. The skill lies in writing function names and descriptions that pretty much guarantee that he can hardly do wrong.
        hhm 18y ago
        Do you really believe that? The implementation requires skills too, and without those skills, you get terrible and buggy code, even if it uses pretty names and if it follows your descriptions more or less.
      - shiranaihito 18y ago
        Review? On seeing your first comment, I sort of knew where this was going.. Looking at horrible code produced by your cheap rent-a-coders won't make it any better - making it yourself might.
procrastitron 18y ago
I don't know about hiring other people to work on it... good people will cost you and bad people will cost you even more. However, there is another alternative if you can split your design up into infrastructure and core technology; open source the infrastructure. Obviously, the first step is to use as much existing open source code as possible, but a lot of companies will also need to do some custom infrastructure on top of that. These extensions can be a distraction, so if you can leverage the open source community to help develop/maintain them you will eliminate a huge time sink.

wlievens 18y ago

Usually, the reason for staying at your full-time job while working on your project in your free time is that you don't want to take the financial risk of going full time on the project. I find it hard to believe why you'd rather stay employed yet use that money to pay others to work on your project.

maxklein 18y ago
You will hire cheap programmers from abroad who will work for a fraction of your salary. For example, you earn $3000 a month and spend $600 a month on your startup. You still have enough and more left over.
- jauco 18y ago
  You probably shouldn't hire extremely cheap programmers if you want a product that, besides barely functioning, is also extensible and scalable. No matter what country your programmers are from, if they have spent enough time working on various projects to know what they're doing, they probably also know what they're worth.
  - maxklein 18y ago
    If you spend an hour every day reviewing the code and making design decisions, you could very well hire monkeys and they would come up with good code. You have to micromanage the code to get good results.
    - alex_c 18y ago
      I'm not the one who modded you down, but... I'm having trouble seeing how this would work. What do you do if the code isn't up to par? Are you willing to basically pay - with both cash and time - for the privilege of educating the programmers you're using until they're up to your standards? Or to throw away their work and look for better programmers, possibly ad infinitum? Rewrite parts of the code yourself? I haven't outsourced any projects so far. I have, however, worked on a project launched with an off-the-shelf script - it definitely saved time and effort upfront, but the code is far from great, so it's been more frustrating over time. I still haven't decided whether the tradeoff was worth it. Have you actually used this strategy yourself, and if so, how did you make it work?
      - maxklein 18y ago
        What I do is this: model the part of the project you want with uml and write the function names. You solve the bulk of the design issues and all the coder has to do is fill in the functions. The skill lies in writing function names and descriptions that pretty much guarantee that he can hardly do wrong.
        hhm 18y ago
        Do you really believe that? The implementation requires skills too, and without those skills, you get terrible and buggy code, even if it uses pretty names and if it follows your descriptions more or less.
    - shiranaihito 18y ago
      Review? On seeing your first comment, I sort of knew where this was going.. Looking at horrible code produced by your cheap rent-a-coders won't make it any better - making it yourself might.

procrastitron 18y ago

I don't know about hiring other people to work on it... good people will cost you and bad people will cost you even more. However, there is another alternative if you can split your design up into infrastructure and core technology; open source the infrastructure. Obviously, the first step is to use as much existing open source code as possible, but a lot of companies will also need to do some custom infrastructure on top of that. These extensions can be a distraction, so if you can leverage the open source community to help develop/maintain them you will eliminate a huge time sink.