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Comment by throwaway2016a | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2016a

Edit note: Some of the points in this article are really good so this is mostly just a rant on coding bootcamps from a bitter Computer Science grad who had to work 20 years to get where I am :)

Meanwhile to some of these points... we had a client recently where we built their mobile app. Large app, over $50,000 with a full API backend. Not a simple hello world. And then they hired someone straight from a boot camp to manage their mobile app, API, website, everything. And gave that person a Director title.

Yes, I know, titles are cheap at startups. But I guess you can learn to code in three months and not only get a job but apparently be director level.

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Amateur mistake ;)

Truth be told: Titles are meaningless, the only thing that matters is the pay.

Giving impressive titles is simply a very cheap and efficient way to make naive young employees feel important and valued, while really they are not.

#ForwardDeployedEngineer

Until you have to hire more team members in which case you may have a problem. That is how companies get absurd things like three different technology VPs and a CTO in a 10 person company. (exaggerated obviously)

Or your environment is an absolute flaming disaster but your manager gives you a bad review because they don't understand why someone would want to write unit tests to run across distributed databases to confirm consistency and correctness. So, your environment remains in a broken state, reports have wrong numbers, and development moves at a snails pace because of constant issues. And the person that actually knew enough to identify and fix the problem is fired for insubordination.

Or that...

I think you might not be charging enough.

Not saying I disagree but... out of curiosity, what do you think we should charge for an API + native iOS app + app landing page / website + QA? I know you don't know the details of the specification but ballpark.

1 dev for backend and api, 1 dev for phone app, 1 qa, outsource landing page. 3 months for the project. Monthly spend: 3.5 x n where n is a proxy for quality and probability of successful project completion; $5k, $10k, $20k.

3 x 3.5 x $20k = $210k

Thank you. This is helpful for me. I always tell my CEO we don't charge enough.

With that said though, it didn't take us three months. But we had slightly more people than you gave too.

That sounds like how people become low level managers, too.

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