Hacker News Reader

Comment by dxbydt | Hacker News Reader

> Am I missing something?

I think you are. I work fulltime at a bank for my paycheck. I have an internet connection in my apartment, and an office assigned wintel laptop. When I get home at 6ish, I can maybe put it 2-3 hours of coding. Right now I code 8 hours of Scala for my dayjob. Have always been wanting to check out what objective-C is all about. Perhaps I could learn how to write an app. Don't have an iphone ipad imac etc. So paying $40 a month to check this out is not such a bad idea. I'll sign up, see if I can hack objective-C on the iOS, and take it from there.

View on HN

So let's assume you wills spend couple of months learning iOS, and will decide that you're into it. Will you buy yourself a Mac at that point?

Assuming yes, you've maybe generated them $100 in revenue. They would need 10,000 people like you to generate their first million in revenue, and they have obviously many costs.

Do you think the world has at least 10,000 people interested in iOS development who don't have a mac yet? 100,000?

You are trying to count your chickens before they hatch.Before Netflix came along, the thinking was - if you like a movie you will just buy the DVD so you can watch it any number of times. Its just $10, why not just buy it ? Guess what, I watch tons of movies, don't buy a single DVD. If I like the movie I put it on my netflix queue & then watch it right there. If its not available, no skin off my back - there's plenty of other movies that are available on my queue, some 300+ are unwatched, last I checked. My wife averages 3 books a month. We don't own a single "book". She's on her 2nd kindle and all our books are essentially on the AWS. When she moves to her 3rd kindle & so on...the books will continue to be on the cloud. She downloads one book, reads it & then deletes it & downloads the next. So yes, owning a Mac, or even a PC is not on my to-do list. The bank gives me a laptop, why should I go buy my own PC ? And for what ? 8 hours of Scala per day at my desk is quite enough. I don't bring my work home. Objective-C will start out as a hobby. I don't know if I'm going to be able to complete my app, put it on the app-store, get customers etc. Seems like a daunting task. So no, I won't buy a Mac. And yes, the world has plenty of people who work for big-corp and pull in 150k coding business apps, with no desire to own Macs & PC, while still doing some hobby coding in some fringe language on the side just to retain their sanity. Office work gets boring after a while, and I plan to write silly time-waster apps in objective C, not your standard issue portfolio optimization code which I do at work anyways.

I just did some quick calculations and you can buy an used mac for the price you would pay for a year of this service. And your analogy is completely wrong, at least for me, I don't watch a movie much more than on time, unless it is already playing for one motive or other.

But you will use the same computer for a time.

So he has to wait a year to be able to buy the mac or he can start coding right now...

Wait. You are a professional programmer at a bank and you don't own a PC or mac at home? Is this common? How do you keep your skills up to speed?

I'm confused as well by this. From my perspective, in order to keep your business and personal lives separate (and private) you need two separate systems to work on. I have no interest in IT possibly being able to log or monitor my interactions with my personal GMail, bank accounts, etc. Since most companies Acceptable Use Policies provides them with the right to monitor all of this and more, it seems necessary.

Other people though don't seem to feel as strongly about keeping their work and personal lives separate...

I find folders and mail accounts work fine for keeping work and personal stuff separate. Just having one computer to deal with is nice. And cheaper.

> Is this common?

Well, its not uncommon. From my unscientific survey among my colleagues I'd say ppl who don't own machines is upwards of 60%. Its not hard to see why. Banks work you quite hard anyways. I stare at a PC 8 hours a day. Plus there's the pager so you can respond to calls at night & so on...the association of PC=Work becomes quite hardwired. Last thing I'd want to do is muck around with a computer at home as well. If I buy a PC/Mac, like a desktop with monitor, where do I keep it ? I have to buy a computer desk and computer chair and all that? Dude I live in a tiny apartment 10 minutes from the bank. There's no space. As to keeping up with my skills - I've been doing this some dozen plus years at this point. I will say if you know how to fold and write a parser combinator, you are golden. I know both, so my comp science degree wasn't a total waste. Most of what I do is just some combination of map reduce filter fold partition, occasionally some lazy eval/Stream, some memoization, rest is just standard finance - portfolio theory, capm, derivatives, option pricing, stochastic calculus etc - you learn those at school anyways, otherwise they won't give you a diploma, and the bank won't hire you without a diploma.

Do you like what you do? Is the pay or reward worth it?

With Netflix, their value proposition is:

- Simplicity - it's very simple to select a movie on their website, and you can spare a walk to a DVD rental shop/supermarket. It's even easier to stream a movie.

- Price. $10/month is much cheaper than $15/DVD, if I watch several movies a month and don't plan to re-watch same movies very often

I don't see how that's applicable to the remove development - price argument doesn't work (it's actually cheaper to own an old Mac in the long run) and simplicity could work both ways - it's easier to start with remote development but having a local GUI development is probably easier.

Re: your decision to buy or not to buy a Mac - I just wanted to highlight that on the grand scheme of things - where you want to invest your time, which is your most valuable asset - decision to buy an old mac is an easy one to make.

An old Mac will still take you 6-12 months to price-match this service...and they're running on modern equipment, keeping it updated (hardware and software) for you, and giving you instant access from anywhere, even your iOS device. If you want to use current hardware, you'll have to save money even longer (18-24 months), and you'll have to spend time managing the system & tools configuration.

Sure this all may not be a big deal to most developers. "Most" isn't "all".

Buy an iPod Touch, start writing iOS software. You can be in the black on this within days.

Also, you can directly bill this as a cost to a project/client. It is (for some people) harder to justify charging a client for use of hardware you have on hand than for an external service you're using specifically for their job...

I suspect it might be a sneaky way to work around corporate IT department policies too "I'm not buying unsupported or non-preferred-vendor Apple hardware, I'm just using an external service, just like AWS or Akamai".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com