Hacker News Reader

Comment by ecuzzillo | Hacker News Reader

You can order a filet for a fairly predictable price, it will take a fairly predictable amount of time, and it will fairly predictably make you happy.

Software, by and large, does not make people happy or do what they want nearly as reliably as steak does, and so if I were them I would be much more finicky about paying people to make it for me than I am about paying people to make me steak.

And especially, software made to order has even lower mean and even higher variance than most of the software that people use. And you don't know what you're getting until you get it, at which point the incompetent software vendor is demanding some ridiculously exorbitant sum for something it turned out you didn't want anyway.

You personally may not suck at programming, but the majority of programmers do, and so people are very justifiably unwilling to cough up the dough programmers demand.

View on HN

I'm not really sure whether arguing the "the work you receive might suck" case is helpful for the discussion. (I'm also pretty sure that it won't get you much love here for that train of though ;-) )

If that's where you start, sure, you can arrive at a lot of conclusions and be none the wiser. I have been to restaurants where the steak was far less reliable than you suppose.

Actually, that's not true - I avoid restaurants like that by figuring out that the one I do go to respects me as a client as I do respect it as the place that makes my tummy full. And there we arrive at the point of the video: The vendors are the ones who bring respect and quality to the table, the problem is that the clients do in no way mirror that respect.

If a client is willing to "just get somebody to do something for as little cash as possible", that's what they will get. Fortunately, people who care about the things they want to have done check first, treat their business partners well and live in a happy place where real things are negotiated for real prices that are then paid like adults.

The obvious counterpoint to that is that there is no give and take in the preparation of a filet.

The success of a development project, or software implementation depends just as much on involvement from the customer as it does for the developer or provider.

In the enterprise, this means setting up a project consisting of stakeholders from which you can gather information, get integration assistance, etc. In the single-project bespoke software or web development arena, it's even more important that the customer is able to provide good feedback, offer and direct according to their vision, etc.

Back to the steak analogy, what would be the remediation for the customer yelling "More salt! More salt!" and then refusing to pay when the final product is too salty?

The remediation would be to leave the restaurant that lets customers demand more salt, and get a job at a restaurant where salt is applied correctly and customers can take it or leave it.

In other words, if you're good at programming, why are you in the custom software business instead of something more scalable?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com