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Remember those "day in the life of a Google Project Manager" videos, where they do nothing but hang out on Zoom meetings and pig out on free food and snacks? Y

Remember those "day in the life of a Google Project Manager" videos, where they do nothing but hang out on Zoom meetings and pig out on free food and snacks? Yeah, in many cases, those folks make roughly $235k/year. (And consume another $100k/year in lobster, shrimp, smoothies, and snickers bars.) $235k is absolutely nothing for software development, and you probably won't be able to hire even one talented developer -- let alone a team -- with a war-chest that size.

boredumb 3y ago
Meh. You can get a good developer for 50-150k without lobster. You can't force them to all live in san francisco but I could hire two devs and have some marketing money left over with 235k with a year and a half ramp.
sam_goody 3y ago
Well, no. If everything is open source, $235K is good for perks and incentives - and to ensure that the project is alive and active. People will do a whole lot when the incentive is not the paycheck.
- gizmo 3y ago
  Gimp and Paint.net have probably benefited from a million hours of open source labor and yet their capabilities are nowhere near Adobe's products. People underestimate how much work commercial software takes by many orders of magnitude. This kickstarter is maybe performance art but if they're serious there is no chance in hell they will actually produce software that is actually competitive with an Adobe suite product.
  - herbst 3y ago
    No idea about Paint.Net but there is not a single thing i could name that I am missing with Gimp. The only downside of Inkscape is that it doesn't properly open and save the most recent Adobe formats other than that I also have no idea why I would need anything more than what Inkscape offers. Sure the Adobe tools have a lot to explore, a lot of buttons and options hidden in millions of submenus. But a good portion of computer users have only a limited need for tools like this, no interest in that constant learning curve after major updates and no use for all those advanced features. Imagine I learned using these tools 20 years ago, and while they heavily improved they still work exactly the same. Every time I meet Photoshop it 180d their design and button placements... My point is you do not need to feature match Adobe to compete, making it more accessible alone could be a selling point.
    - throwaway2990 3y ago
      And yet gimp does not have the productivity to be used in a creative agency. So while you find gimp useful. It’s useless to pretty much every agency in existence.
    - wiseowise 3y ago
      > No idea about Paint.Net but there is not a single thing i could name that I am missing with Gimp. > The only downside of Inkscape is that it doesn't properly open and save the most recent Adobe formats other than that I also have no idea why I would need anything more than what Inkscape offers. Good for you. I can assure you that you'll find thousands of creative workers that will find what's missing from those tools. > My point is you do not need to feature match Adobe to compete, making it more accessible alone could be a selling point. That's why GIMP and Inkscape are industry standards that displaced Adobe tools.
      - herbst 3y ago
        > That's why GIMP and Inkscape are industry standards that displaced Adobe tools. Depends where you go. If you go to a CCC event or a Linux shop I am sure they are.
  - mejutoco 3y ago
    As a counterexample, I would say Blender is even more complicated and is doing very well with the same model. Of course, it started as commercial software but still.
  - cmiles74 3y ago
    Perhaps this project will spend it's funding on a fork of Gimp that is more similar to the Photoshop UI and closes some of the gap in features.
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  It's not open source
onion2k 3y ago
you probably won't be able to hire even one talented developer -- let alone a team -- with a war-chest that size Maybe you're not aware of this thing called equity, and how it's often a part of an offer to a founding engineer..
pillefitz 3y ago
In most countries for the majority of developers, $235k is a LOT of money and enough to finance a startup for the first two years or so with 2 developers.
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  Good luck taking on Adobe with 2 engineers.
  - naillo 3y ago
    Adobe seems exeptionally unproductive with incredible product stagnation so this doesn't seem that infeasible to me.
    - Keyframe 3y ago
      Exceptionally unproductive? What are you on about? Could they make larger swings? Sure. Are they exceptionally unproductive? Compared to whom? They dominate pretty much all market segments they're in. For example, they took on Apple, after a grudge, and won (Apple had something to do with that too). AI showed up, Adobe is pretty much the only major established player that put it in consumer hands ASAP and in a way that is both legal and makes great sense. Others (majors), if they even showed up with anything AI leaned on others (Microsoft -> OpenAI). Adobe is moving at a steady strong pace which one cannot ignore. They don't have ferocity or (sometimes) velocity of a hungry small player.. yet, there aren't any in their space. There's Autodesk (lol) and of smaller in video there is The Foundry (if you want to see exceptionally unproductive, at small scale).
      - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
        > Compared to whom? - Procreate - Figma - Blender - Maxon - Davinchi - Autodesk - Stability Honestly hard to name a company in the space shipping less than Adobe.
        Keyframe 3y ago
ohgodplsno 3y ago
Irrelevant and based on very specific US salaries (actually, no, US tech hub salaries), along with absolutely no guarantee of having talented developers even at prices above. Otherwise, Google would be filled with talented developers, and we all know that's not true. The creator of the kickstarter lives in the UK. Even assuming the absolute worst of London salaries, you can pay for two developers, full time. If you look at other places in the UK or Europe that aren't overinflated with capital-city-salaries, there are a shitload of talented developers that will cost you anywhere from 50 to 100k a year. Eastern Europe is filled with extremely talented people.
phpisthebest 3y ago
This type of attitude is exactly why silicon valley is primed for failure The bloat and the expense of silicon valley is going to be their downfall. plenty of regions in the US and other nations have many talented developers that are willing to work for far less and make a far better product than what you get for silicon valley wages
- traceroute66 3y ago
  > other nations have many talented developers Yes there are other nations that have talented developers. But anywhere that has genuinely talented developers, the developers will still want a decent salary. I'm not going to name names, but if you are thinking about the "outsourcing nations", then I don't know about you, but I think most of us here have experienced the poor quality coding output from those developers. The Quality Control simply is not there, normally because the company doing the outsourcing is too cheap to pay for proper supervision and quality control.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    Sure but a decent salary is far different from "235k/year. (And consume another $100k/year in lobster, shrimp, smoothies, and snickers bars.)" If You can't see that there is a middle ground between impoverished wages and what was quoted above that I can't help you
    - traceroute66 3y ago
      > If You can't see that there is a middle ground between ... I can see a middle ground. Most people would probably name it as Europe. And you would have to go looking in Eastern Europe. And I think you would find, if you are lucky, that a competent European junior-ish developer would not get out of bed for less than 60k Euros (65k USD), a more senior developer would demand more. And you need more than one or two developers on your team if you're going to be competing against Adobe. And then you need to pay taxes, pensions, accountants and lawyers. And then you need to pay other business expenses. And if you decide you need an office, then god help you ... The numbers soon add up .... $235k will disappear within the year, probably within a single quarter. Software development is capital intensive.
herbst 3y ago
I use Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, ... Except blender the others don't have any funding near those 250k and yet they compete very well to Adobe (I know many would deny that, but for me they do) Money alone doesn't make good software.
- riffraff 3y ago
  but the guy who started this kickstarter obviously does not feel that Gimp, Inkscape, Paint.net... are good enough, or he would not plan to build new tools. So a zillion people working on gimp could not do it, while a handful with 250k in funding can? This is performance art, not a project.
hardware2win 3y ago
You can EASILY get talented dev for 235k from cheap countries
justinclift 3y ago
Isn't the $235k only really needed to get them through their first prototypes? When they can show working progress they can then do more fund raising, or maybe outright sales of the early releases?
- constantcrying 3y ago
  They need $235k to get to their next round of funding. Which could be selling the prototype, more crowdfunding or other investment.
TheHappyOddish 3y ago
I was going to say "what a weirdly US-centric" vie, but it's not even that. Most of th US population is nowhere close to that pay grade. Silicoln Valley is living in a bubble. There are millions upon millions of talented developers out there earning a fraction of that but still enjoying a higher than cost of living wage.

boredumb 3y ago

Meh. You can get a good developer for 50-150k without lobster. You can't force them to all live in san francisco but I could hire two devs and have some marketing money left over with 235k with a year and a half ramp.

sam_goody 3y ago

Well, no. If everything is open source, $235K is good for perks and incentives - and to ensure that the project is alive and active. People will do a whole lot when the incentive is not the paycheck.

gizmo 3y ago
Gimp and Paint.net have probably benefited from a million hours of open source labor and yet their capabilities are nowhere near Adobe's products. People underestimate how much work commercial software takes by many orders of magnitude. This kickstarter is maybe performance art but if they're serious there is no chance in hell they will actually produce software that is actually competitive with an Adobe suite product.
- herbst 3y ago
  No idea about Paint.Net but there is not a single thing i could name that I am missing with Gimp. The only downside of Inkscape is that it doesn't properly open and save the most recent Adobe formats other than that I also have no idea why I would need anything more than what Inkscape offers. Sure the Adobe tools have a lot to explore, a lot of buttons and options hidden in millions of submenus. But a good portion of computer users have only a limited need for tools like this, no interest in that constant learning curve after major updates and no use for all those advanced features. Imagine I learned using these tools 20 years ago, and while they heavily improved they still work exactly the same. Every time I meet Photoshop it 180d their design and button placements... My point is you do not need to feature match Adobe to compete, making it more accessible alone could be a selling point.
  - throwaway2990 3y ago
    And yet gimp does not have the productivity to be used in a creative agency. So while you find gimp useful. It’s useless to pretty much every agency in existence.
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    > No idea about Paint.Net but there is not a single thing i could name that I am missing with Gimp. > The only downside of Inkscape is that it doesn't properly open and save the most recent Adobe formats other than that I also have no idea why I would need anything more than what Inkscape offers. Good for you. I can assure you that you'll find thousands of creative workers that will find what's missing from those tools. > My point is you do not need to feature match Adobe to compete, making it more accessible alone could be a selling point. That's why GIMP and Inkscape are industry standards that displaced Adobe tools.
    - herbst 3y ago
      > That's why GIMP and Inkscape are industry standards that displaced Adobe tools. Depends where you go. If you go to a CCC event or a Linux shop I am sure they are.
- mejutoco 3y ago
  As a counterexample, I would say Blender is even more complicated and is doing very well with the same model. Of course, it started as commercial software but still.
- cmiles74 3y ago
  Perhaps this project will spend it's funding on a fork of Gimp that is more similar to the Photoshop UI and closes some of the gap in features.
RobotToaster 3y ago
It's not open source

onion2k 3y ago

you probably won't be able to hire even one talented developer -- let alone a team -- with a war-chest that size Maybe you're not aware of this thing called equity, and how it's often a part of an offer to a founding engineer..

pillefitz 3y ago

In most countries for the majority of developers, $235k is a LOT of money and enough to finance a startup for the first two years or so with 2 developers.

ZephyrBlu 3y ago
Good luck taking on Adobe with 2 engineers.
- naillo 3y ago
  Adobe seems exeptionally unproductive with incredible product stagnation so this doesn't seem that infeasible to me.
  - Keyframe 3y ago
    Exceptionally unproductive? What are you on about? Could they make larger swings? Sure. Are they exceptionally unproductive? Compared to whom? They dominate pretty much all market segments they're in. For example, they took on Apple, after a grudge, and won (Apple had something to do with that too). AI showed up, Adobe is pretty much the only major established player that put it in consumer hands ASAP and in a way that is both legal and makes great sense. Others (majors), if they even showed up with anything AI leaned on others (Microsoft -> OpenAI). Adobe is moving at a steady strong pace which one cannot ignore. They don't have ferocity or (sometimes) velocity of a hungry small player.. yet, there aren't any in their space. There's Autodesk (lol) and of smaller in video there is The Foundry (if you want to see exceptionally unproductive, at small scale).
    - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
      > Compared to whom? - Procreate - Figma - Blender - Maxon - Davinchi - Autodesk - Stability Honestly hard to name a company in the space shipping less than Adobe.
      - Keyframe 3y ago

ohgodplsno 3y ago

Irrelevant and based on very specific US salaries (actually, no, US tech hub salaries), along with absolutely no guarantee of having talented developers even at prices above. Otherwise, Google would be filled with talented developers, and we all know that's not true. The creator of the kickstarter lives in the UK. Even assuming the absolute worst of London salaries, you can pay for two developers, full time. If you look at other places in the UK or Europe that aren't overinflated with capital-city-salaries, there are a shitload of talented developers that will cost you anywhere from 50 to 100k a year. Eastern Europe is filled with extremely talented people.

phpisthebest 3y ago

This type of attitude is exactly why silicon valley is primed for failure The bloat and the expense of silicon valley is going to be their downfall. plenty of regions in the US and other nations have many talented developers that are willing to work for far less and make a far better product than what you get for silicon valley wages

traceroute66 3y ago
> other nations have many talented developers Yes there are other nations that have talented developers. But anywhere that has genuinely talented developers, the developers will still want a decent salary. I'm not going to name names, but if you are thinking about the "outsourcing nations", then I don't know about you, but I think most of us here have experienced the poor quality coding output from those developers. The Quality Control simply is not there, normally because the company doing the outsourcing is too cheap to pay for proper supervision and quality control.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  Sure but a decent salary is far different from "235k/year. (And consume another $100k/year in lobster, shrimp, smoothies, and snickers bars.)" If You can't see that there is a middle ground between impoverished wages and what was quoted above that I can't help you
  - traceroute66 3y ago
    > If You can't see that there is a middle ground between ... I can see a middle ground. Most people would probably name it as Europe. And you would have to go looking in Eastern Europe. And I think you would find, if you are lucky, that a competent European junior-ish developer would not get out of bed for less than 60k Euros (65k USD), a more senior developer would demand more. And you need more than one or two developers on your team if you're going to be competing against Adobe. And then you need to pay taxes, pensions, accountants and lawyers. And then you need to pay other business expenses. And if you decide you need an office, then god help you ... The numbers soon add up .... $235k will disappear within the year, probably within a single quarter. Software development is capital intensive.

herbst 3y ago

I use Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, ... Except blender the others don't have any funding near those 250k and yet they compete very well to Adobe (I know many would deny that, but for me they do) Money alone doesn't make good software.

riffraff 3y ago
but the guy who started this kickstarter obviously does not feel that Gimp, Inkscape, Paint.net... are good enough, or he would not plan to build new tools. So a zillion people working on gimp could not do it, while a handful with 250k in funding can? This is performance art, not a project.

hardware2win 3y ago

You can EASILY get talented dev for 235k from cheap countries

justinclift 3y ago

Isn't the $235k only really needed to get them through their first prototypes? When they can show working progress they can then do more fund raising, or maybe outright sales of the early releases?

constantcrying 3y ago
They need $235k to get to their next round of funding. Which could be selling the prototype, more crowdfunding or other investment.

TheHappyOddish 3y ago

I was going to say "what a weirdly US-centric" vie, but it's not even that. Most of th US population is nowhere close to that pay grade. Silicoln Valley is living in a bubble. There are millions upon millions of talented developers out there earning a fraction of that but still enjoying a higher than cost of living wage.