Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

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I think anyone who has done any consulting with a big organisation probably has one of these stories. As one of the other commenters says, if the end result is something that the client is happy with, and they actually pay you, you should basically consider this a success!

I spent six months building a single-page app (back when that was still an exciting sounding thing) for a major US financial institution; by the time we actually delivered it, the result was so watered down from the initial proposal that I could've just taken some screenshots from what my designer had produced six months earlier and put them in a PowerPoint deck and said "Done!" - because this was, in fact, what the VP at the company ended up doing, except they were screenshots from the web app we built that no one other than the VP himself ever used.

On the plus side, I became good friends with the VP and the project paid off a significant chunk of the mortgage on my first house.

As an aside, I sometimes have to play UX designer when there is no one qualified available, and I've used every wireframing tool in the market trying to find something that allows me to create UIs as quickly as I can think. A few weeks ago I gave up and in frustration I put together a quick powerpoint so the product team could work on it themselves. It turns out PP is exactly what I was looking for! I found that all the other tools required a lot of setup and configuration that slowed me down, and powerpoint is so simple that you can just start plopping squares down on the page and put a few links in-between slides. I think the real gain for me is that most products I work on end up being data grid heavy, and creating tables in balsalmiq/whatever is always a nightmare.

I've had a lot of luck using Balsamiq as a wireframing or mockup tool. Quick to get into and edit, and clearly meant to be a UI mockup and not a pixel perfect representation of the final product. It eliminates a lot of wasted time on bikeshedding and lets people focus on the layout and flow.

Yeah, Powerpoint is a surprisingly good drawing tool. I remember in college a lot of my classmates used it to create illustrations for their thesis.

Good thing there are no real problems left to work on in this world or this would be a gross mis-allocation of macro resources.

(No judgement on you OP this is the situation we're in)

Ah but if someone paid for it, the problem must be exactly that valuable to them! And if it's valuable to someone, it must be a Real Problem!

When it comes down to it, we're not paid to code. We're paid to solve problems with code and if paying you $75/hr as a contractor to build me three webpages with CI/CD capabilities is it, then off you go.

$75? That's about half of what I would charge myself, and an agency is going to be $300 minimum.

They needed this developer to help them understand what they needed. Every project I’ve worked on (even personal projects) has a fair amount of this.

Yeah, if I paid a carpenter to build me a chair, then decided I wanted a stool, then ended up with a footrest, I would be really happy with him if he delivered all those things so I could try them and make up my mind. It could've been that the agents saw it and said "It's great but send me an email when they click the link", and then the development would have gone in that direction.

Out of interest, do you mean that seriously or are you parodying the sort of knee-jerk reply that an economist might produce?

Personally the capitalized "Real Problem" (along with my current mood) makes me lean towards sarcasm, but yeah, Poe's law...

This kind of misallocation is really the only thing keeping velocity of money high enough to sustain the economy

While I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion, I think it's worth questioning the unspoken premise here:

Is there no other way to support human life than these accelerating grinding gears of money-shuffling?

Or those losses the only thing preventing the creation of even greater things

Well, of course. Problem is that, apparently, we're doing the best we can.

Could you expand that a little for us slowpokes?

Aside, I assume you mean "to sustain the [USA] economy"? Perhaps you mean World economy, or EU, or ...?

The whole point of all of these stories is funny/sad misallocations of resources. The "real problems" thing is a completely unrelated discussion. Not sure why you'd want to weave that in.

He's weaving it in because the parent called it "a success", which is only true from your individual perspective, but not from a societal one. And some people want more from what they're doing than just personal gratification.

I agree that our definition of success should have a strong societal component. However, if you expect societal benefit from every action, including actions heavily dependent on something like the whim of a consulting client, you may be faced with a lot of anxiety when you inevitably fall short, anxiety which may ultimately hamper your later individual capability to achieve societal benefit.

I think you might be overloading the word "success". A successful project doesn't necessarily imply anything beyond delivery of what was agreed upon.

Did he even get personal gratification, he got paid handsomely (by the sounds of it), but it didn't come across as him feeling fulfilled beyond that.

I can confirm that I both got paid handsomely (especially for the second phase of the project where we were on a retainer and literally did one day of work over the course of three months, barring a couple of phone calls) and that I felt very little satisfaction or gratification at the end of it, especially when the whole thing we had built was eventually rebuilt by a different offshoring company using a much clunkier technology stack without so much as a glance at our code.

I stand by my original assessment that, from the perspective of both the client (everyone was happy with the end result) and my consultancy (we delivered work and we got paid), it was a success.

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