4 ms·

ios is a lot of work, programming in general is a lot of work. It is 2012 not 1992, business people in all fields should know programming is not cheap. Business

ios is a lot of work, programming in general is a lot of work. It is 2012 not 1992, business people in all fields should know programming is not cheap. Business people who do not do the research, don't bother with them. Avoid them at all cost. I've learn the best clients are the ones who value your work and are willing to pay for it. Their is a shortage of great programmers.

cryptoz 15y ago
> It is 2012 not 1992 On the other hand, think of what you could accomplish with a weekend of work in 1992 and compare that to 2012. Our abilities as developers/designers/etc are vastly improved due to improved infrastructure, tools, communications, resources, etc. You could build a distributed photo hosting and viewing application back in 1992. But you'd probably be writing it in C++ and it might take you a long time to get something that even works, much less looks reasonably okay and attracts an audience. Now in 2012, you could hack that together in a weekend. To make it a real project may take a few weeks or months, of course, but the pace at which we can build things is indeed speeding up.
- georgieporgie 15y ago
  think of what you could accomplish with a weekend of work in 1992 and compare that to 2012 In 1992 I could bang out some really effective CUI applications in no time at all. People really hadn't transitioned to Windows at that point. Now, I have to write a web app, or a mobile app, and it takes hours upon hours to learn the ins and outs of each new API, weeks to figure out how to customize the flashy UI to what the client wants, etc. So, yeah, programmer tools have gotten vastly better, but expectations and complexity have risen faster.
  - wallflower 15y ago
    > So, yeah, programmer tools have gotten vastly better, but expectations and complexity have risen faster. I am going to roll this into my conversations with non-tech friends. It is like the magic time saving appliances of the fifties...
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  The problem is that once we make 80% of the process vastly more efficient, all it does is throw a spotlight on the remaining 20%. (This is the unheralded dark side of the Pareto principle. ;) Not everything about building an app gets more efficient with time. You can now throw together a photo-hosting and viewing application in a couple of days. But that doesn't necessarily yield a site that runs itself. Teaching the customer to use the code still takes about the same amount of time. Editing the theme over and over again, iterating a design cycle that incorporates emails and meetings between you and the customer and the designer, still takes about the same amount of time. The process of moderating the uploaded photos to screen out the spam and porn still takes about the same amount of time. Usability testing still takes the same amount of time. (And even in the enlightened year of 2012 there are still standard things that all sites could use, like proper reverse-proxy caching and solid backups, that over half the Wordpress blogs on earth seem to be lacking. Apparently we're not even done automating the things that could be automated.) The other problem is that if the customer steps off the well-worn path they will fall into a very deep pit lined with invoices. If Wordpress does it out of the box, it's cheap. If Wordpress almost does it out of the box but it requires even the smallest amount of custom coding, it's expensive. And knowing what things are expensive and what are standard requires skills that customers don't have, so they have to pay a programmer to advise them, and that is itself inefficient and expensive...
  - Tossrock 15y ago
    > The problem is that once we make 80% of the process vastly more efficient, all it does is throw a spotlight on the remaining 20%. (This is the unheralded dark side of the Pareto principle. I think this might be better referred to as the well-known outcome of Amdahl's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law
    - mechanical_fish 15y ago
      Agreed, but if I'm going to jokingly but inaccurately name-check a principle involving the number "80%" I might as well pick on poor Pareto. He's used to it by now. ;)
- arctangent 15y ago
  These days we can certainly build more, faster. But I get the impression that customer expectations are rising at a much faster pace.
- tewks 15y ago
  Time to prototype has definitely gotten cheaper. C is still necessary for a lot of people at scale.
  - tomjen3 15y ago
    I doubt that -- there aren't that many programmers writing lowlevel OS or database code and most everybody else use something more productive.
- trotsky 15y ago
  nntp://alt.pics.pets There is 1992's distributed photo sharing app, built in ~5 minutes without any c++ and you had the whole rest of the weekend to get into flame wars about how ugly someone's cat was. Sure you can get a lot more done now with advanced tools and infrastructure, but really expectations and requirements have grown much faster. You could definitely launch a median web or win32 app in '94 faster than you can now.
tatsuke95 15y ago
Don't hate me, I'm going by experience: I think this is backwards. Programming is cheaper than ever. As outsourcing tools because better (vWorker is what I have experience with) this is only going to get better. Programmers have to realize that there are hungry, capable people around the world who can do much of what you can for far cheaper. I'm not taking anything away from anyone, but that's the reality of globalization. I've been able to get projects (mostly simple web development) done at less than half the price through outsourcing.
- funkyboy 15y ago
  Yep, but I guess if you have an "hardcore" project you won't find cheap devs (who deliver clean and reusable code on time) easily.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  Good for you. Most outsourcing projects don't go nearly that well. Which is a shame, but understandable. Why should the good Indian programmers work on the kind of projects people are willing to sell?
  - tatsuke95 15y ago
    >"Most outsourcing projects don't go nearly that well." Do you have a source for this? I'm a "business guy", but I read the hell out of Hacker News. I hear this a lot, but it hasn't been my experience, whatsoever. Seriously, how is an outsider supposed to read these arguments as anything more than people on the inside trying to justify what they do and the prices they charge? Read that article again. It's written for other hackers, not for business people. He says, "making an app is hard, here is why" and lists a bunch of things that, to be frank, I don't care about. I need the product to meet my specifications for a good price. Nothing more, nothing less. And generally in my experience (which, again, is mostly small projects) that is fulfilled through outsourced work. The fact that any mention of outsourcing draws the ire and down votes of this crowd is disappointing. At the end of the day, like it or not, people like me are also an essential part of this ecosystem. Edit: after reading through many of the comments, it looks like there are varying degrees of this problem. I'm not talking about trying to get someone to build an app for my "big idea" for $200.
funkyboy 15y ago
There is also shortage of so called "entrepreneurs" which are able to fairly judge the value of a service.

cryptoz 15y ago

> It is 2012 not 1992 On the other hand, think of what you could accomplish with a weekend of work in 1992 and compare that to 2012. Our abilities as developers/designers/etc are vastly improved due to improved infrastructure, tools, communications, resources, etc. You could build a distributed photo hosting and viewing application back in 1992. But you'd probably be writing it in C++ and it might take you a long time to get something that even works, much less looks reasonably okay and attracts an audience. Now in 2012, you could hack that together in a weekend. To make it a real project may take a few weeks or months, of course, but the pace at which we can build things is indeed speeding up.

georgieporgie 15y ago
think of what you could accomplish with a weekend of work in 1992 and compare that to 2012 In 1992 I could bang out some really effective CUI applications in no time at all. People really hadn't transitioned to Windows at that point. Now, I have to write a web app, or a mobile app, and it takes hours upon hours to learn the ins and outs of each new API, weeks to figure out how to customize the flashy UI to what the client wants, etc. So, yeah, programmer tools have gotten vastly better, but expectations and complexity have risen faster.
- wallflower 15y ago
  > So, yeah, programmer tools have gotten vastly better, but expectations and complexity have risen faster. I am going to roll this into my conversations with non-tech friends. It is like the magic time saving appliances of the fifties...
mechanical_fish 15y ago
The problem is that once we make 80% of the process vastly more efficient, all it does is throw a spotlight on the remaining 20%. (This is the unheralded dark side of the Pareto principle. ;) Not everything about building an app gets more efficient with time. You can now throw together a photo-hosting and viewing application in a couple of days. But that doesn't necessarily yield a site that runs itself. Teaching the customer to use the code still takes about the same amount of time. Editing the theme over and over again, iterating a design cycle that incorporates emails and meetings between you and the customer and the designer, still takes about the same amount of time. The process of moderating the uploaded photos to screen out the spam and porn still takes about the same amount of time. Usability testing still takes the same amount of time. (And even in the enlightened year of 2012 there are still standard things that all sites could use, like proper reverse-proxy caching and solid backups, that over half the Wordpress blogs on earth seem to be lacking. Apparently we're not even done automating the things that could be automated.) The other problem is that if the customer steps off the well-worn path they will fall into a very deep pit lined with invoices. If Wordpress does it out of the box, it's cheap. If Wordpress almost does it out of the box but it requires even the smallest amount of custom coding, it's expensive. And knowing what things are expensive and what are standard requires skills that customers don't have, so they have to pay a programmer to advise them, and that is itself inefficient and expensive...
- Tossrock 15y ago
  > The problem is that once we make 80% of the process vastly more efficient, all it does is throw a spotlight on the remaining 20%. (This is the unheralded dark side of the Pareto principle. I think this might be better referred to as the well-known outcome of Amdahl's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law
  - mechanical_fish 15y ago
    Agreed, but if I'm going to jokingly but inaccurately name-check a principle involving the number "80%" I might as well pick on poor Pareto. He's used to it by now. ;)
arctangent 15y ago
These days we can certainly build more, faster. But I get the impression that customer expectations are rising at a much faster pace.
tewks 15y ago
Time to prototype has definitely gotten cheaper. C is still necessary for a lot of people at scale.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  I doubt that -- there aren't that many programmers writing lowlevel OS or database code and most everybody else use something more productive.
trotsky 15y ago
nntp://alt.pics.pets There is 1992's distributed photo sharing app, built in ~5 minutes without any c++ and you had the whole rest of the weekend to get into flame wars about how ugly someone's cat was. Sure you can get a lot more done now with advanced tools and infrastructure, but really expectations and requirements have grown much faster. You could definitely launch a median web or win32 app in '94 faster than you can now.

tatsuke95 15y ago

Don't hate me, I'm going by experience: I think this is backwards. Programming is cheaper than ever. As outsourcing tools because better (vWorker is what I have experience with) this is only going to get better. Programmers have to realize that there are hungry, capable people around the world who can do much of what you can for far cheaper. I'm not taking anything away from anyone, but that's the reality of globalization. I've been able to get projects (mostly simple web development) done at less than half the price through outsourcing.

funkyboy 15y ago
Yep, but I guess if you have an "hardcore" project you won't find cheap devs (who deliver clean and reusable code on time) easily.
tomjen3 15y ago
Good for you. Most outsourcing projects don't go nearly that well. Which is a shame, but understandable. Why should the good Indian programmers work on the kind of projects people are willing to sell?
- tatsuke95 15y ago
  >"Most outsourcing projects don't go nearly that well." Do you have a source for this? I'm a "business guy", but I read the hell out of Hacker News. I hear this a lot, but it hasn't been my experience, whatsoever. Seriously, how is an outsider supposed to read these arguments as anything more than people on the inside trying to justify what they do and the prices they charge? Read that article again. It's written for other hackers, not for business people. He says, "making an app is hard, here is why" and lists a bunch of things that, to be frank, I don't care about. I need the product to meet my specifications for a good price. Nothing more, nothing less. And generally in my experience (which, again, is mostly small projects) that is fulfilled through outsourced work. The fact that any mention of outsourcing draws the ire and down votes of this crowd is disappointing. At the end of the day, like it or not, people like me are also an essential part of this ecosystem. Edit: after reading through many of the comments, it looks like there are varying degrees of this problem. I'm not talking about trying to get someone to build an app for my "big idea" for $200.

funkyboy 15y ago

There is also shortage of so called "entrepreneurs" which are able to fairly judge the value of a service.