4 ms·

It depends on your definition of "rockstar" but your pricing appears high. To share an anecdote: I was having a chat with a HNWI who wanted to "get into startu

by crdb 12y ago

It depends on your definition of "rockstar" but your pricing appears high. To share an anecdote: I was having a chat with a HNWI who wanted to "get into startups" about the cost of launching a product that he was thinking about (something similar in complexity to OpenTable). He had very high estimates in mind, something along the lines of what you're talking about and half a year. I told him it was probably possible to do it much faster by employing experienced developers at a high hourly rate but whose experience would drastically cut both mistake time and planning time. He asked me to get him a quote, so I contacted two guys I knew from the functional programming meetups, both with PhDs and recently published papers, both with half a decade experience in a big famous company based in Silicon Valley, both having worked with each other on consulting projects for years, and they spent a week drafting a rough, serious quote. The estimate came to around 25-40x cheaper than what you're talking about, and two months (part-time, on the side of their research work) to launch + USD 2k/month post launch to maintain it with no new features. Of course, the HNWI changed his mind (in part due to a co-investor on another project who objected to the "high" estimate and told him to use free or cheap fresh grads instead... welcome to the world outside the US) and I profusely apologised to my contacts for having wasted their time, but it did put an order of magnitude on the "high quality contracting" idea.

forrestthewoods 12y ago
I didn't understand consulting until a post on HN awhile back. It was a friendly guy who liked to hangout and chat with fellow devs. While visiting a city, Chicago I believe, he met up with coffee with a guy possibly also from HN. They talked, went back to the office, and he talked with another employee for awhile. The guy in question I believe had a background in SEO so he just kinda shared what he knew for 2 or 3 hours. Then they shook hands and went their separate ways. A few weeks later he e-mailed back asking how much he would have paid if that friendly chat with an official consulting job. The answer was around $10,000. Yes it was only 2-3 hours of time, but built upon thousands of hours of experience. And the changes they could immediately implement would generate more than $10k in increased revenue so it would easily be worth it. My point here is that it doesn't matter jack shit how many hours are spent on a project or how cheaply it could be done. What's infinitely more important is how much money can be made. If you can get more money out than you put in and putting more money in means you get more out then you put as much in as you can afford. Now for someone to plop down a million bucks on three months worth of work means they'd have to be unusually confident in a project's chances of success. So that number I gave is pretty high. However paying big money to a seasoned vet to get the ball rolling makes an unbelievable amount of sense.
- tlrobinson 12y ago
  That would be patio11 and tptacek: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1 https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...
- jcr 12y ago
  Your recollection of the story is a little off, but it's close. The story you mentioned was from 5 years ago (2009). It was mentioned in a blog post in 20011 [1] and again in a podcast in 2012 [2]. It involved Patrick McKenzie (a.k.a "patio11" [3]) and Thomas Ptacek (a.k.a "tptacek" [4]). They are two of the most prolific contributors to HN [5]. Needless to say, times change. At present, Patrick's consulting rate is somewhere north of $30K a week [6], and dare I say it, I'm sure he's worth every penny of it for the right companies. [1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/07/08/business-psychology/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/07/08/business-psychology/ [2] http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/26/patio11-part2/ http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/26/patio11-part2/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574541
  - forrestthewoods 12y ago
    I knew it was a prolific HN poster but alas I could not remember who. Given that the blog post was from 2011 I think that's forgivable! Well, maybe. Thanks for the links.
smm2000 12y ago
I seriously doubt they would have been able to deliver site with complexity of Opentable in a couple of month even if working full time. Do they have track record of building sites like this in that short timeframe? In two month you could deliver something that will choke with 20 users, will have no failover or reliable backup, horrible db schema and will likely have unusable design. Anything else requires more time, meetings, people and research. Even if it was their idea (aka no communication and decision overhead, working 16hours/day), two month is pushing it.
- crdb 12y ago
  Considering these guys were working with petabytes/day scale web stuff beforehand (guess that narrows down the previous employer...), I'm sure they'd know, and that quote was for part time work, not 16 hours a day. I know both personally, have seen their code and previous work, and trust them to have given a pessimistic estimate. If you have tight, modular code following good practices (e.g. a relational backend, not an ORM), you have experience doing it before, there's no micro-manager, and with a clearly defined, functional spec, you can build robust things that scale well relatively quickly. We're not talking about a new Facebook here, merely copying 80% of the functionality of an existing product for a launch in markets with no competition, as greenfield. Also, it's not like a site like that would reach a million users in a couple of months, nor would it win design awards, but why should it? It just needs to process transactions accurately and list a bunch of shops across a few countries. I do think that the global market for programming talent is like that for real estate here in Singapore: I pay around 2 grand a month, and my neighbours across the street something like 8-10 for the same space. It is what it is. You'd be amazed how "cheap" it can be to hire a greybeard these days, sometimes less than twice a fresh Stanford grad...
  - tracker1 12y ago
    Not only that, but simply keeping an existing system from crushing itself under its' own weight... Knowing how/where you can effectively add caching, or even pre-aggregated data into an existing system can be the difference between a system going under, and being able to keep the single-instance database server from collapsing your business while a new system can be established.
sjg007 12y ago
Charge for the quote as well. Especially if it is a detailed design.

by crdb 12y ago

forrestthewoods 12y ago

I didn't understand consulting until a post on HN awhile back. It was a friendly guy who liked to hangout and chat with fellow devs. While visiting a city, Chicago I believe, he met up with coffee with a guy possibly also from HN. They talked, went back to the office, and he talked with another employee for awhile. The guy in question I believe had a background in SEO so he just kinda shared what he knew for 2 or 3 hours. Then they shook hands and went their separate ways. A few weeks later he e-mailed back asking how much he would have paid if that friendly chat with an official consulting job. The answer was around $10,000. Yes it was only 2-3 hours of time, but built upon thousands of hours of experience. And the changes they could immediately implement would generate more than $10k in increased revenue so it would easily be worth it. My point here is that it doesn't matter jack shit how many hours are spent on a project or how cheaply it could be done. What's infinitely more important is how much money can be made. If you can get more money out than you put in and putting more money in means you get more out then you put as much in as you can afford. Now for someone to plop down a million bucks on three months worth of work means they'd have to be unusually confident in a project's chances of success. So that number I gave is pretty high. However paying big money to a seasoned vet to get the ball rolling makes an unbelievable amount of sense.

tlrobinson 12y ago
That would be patio11 and tptacek: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1 https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...
jcr 12y ago
Your recollection of the story is a little off, but it's close. The story you mentioned was from 5 years ago (2009). It was mentioned in a blog post in 20011 [1] and again in a podcast in 2012 [2]. It involved Patrick McKenzie (a.k.a "patio11" [3]) and Thomas Ptacek (a.k.a "tptacek" [4]). They are two of the most prolific contributors to HN [5]. Needless to say, times change. At present, Patrick's consulting rate is somewhere north of $30K a week [6], and dare I say it, I'm sure he's worth every penny of it for the right companies. [1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/07/08/business-psychology/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/07/08/business-psychology/ [2] http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/26/patio11-part2/ http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/26/patio11-part2/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574541
- forrestthewoods 12y ago
  I knew it was a prolific HN poster but alas I could not remember who. Given that the blog post was from 2011 I think that's forgivable! Well, maybe. Thanks for the links.

smm2000 12y ago

I seriously doubt they would have been able to deliver site with complexity of Opentable in a couple of month even if working full time. Do they have track record of building sites like this in that short timeframe? In two month you could deliver something that will choke with 20 users, will have no failover or reliable backup, horrible db schema and will likely have unusable design. Anything else requires more time, meetings, people and research. Even if it was their idea (aka no communication and decision overhead, working 16hours/day), two month is pushing it.

crdb 12y ago
Considering these guys were working with petabytes/day scale web stuff beforehand (guess that narrows down the previous employer...), I'm sure they'd know, and that quote was for part time work, not 16 hours a day. I know both personally, have seen their code and previous work, and trust them to have given a pessimistic estimate. If you have tight, modular code following good practices (e.g. a relational backend, not an ORM), you have experience doing it before, there's no micro-manager, and with a clearly defined, functional spec, you can build robust things that scale well relatively quickly. We're not talking about a new Facebook here, merely copying 80% of the functionality of an existing product for a launch in markets with no competition, as greenfield. Also, it's not like a site like that would reach a million users in a couple of months, nor would it win design awards, but why should it? It just needs to process transactions accurately and list a bunch of shops across a few countries. I do think that the global market for programming talent is like that for real estate here in Singapore: I pay around 2 grand a month, and my neighbours across the street something like 8-10 for the same space. It is what it is. You'd be amazed how "cheap" it can be to hire a greybeard these days, sometimes less than twice a fresh Stanford grad...
- tracker1 12y ago
  Not only that, but simply keeping an existing system from crushing itself under its' own weight... Knowing how/where you can effectively add caching, or even pre-aggregated data into an existing system can be the difference between a system going under, and being able to keep the single-instance database server from collapsing your business while a new system can be established.

sjg007 12y ago

Charge for the quote as well. Especially if it is a detailed design.