Of Wizards and Magical Machines (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Of Wizards and Magical Machines (2012)

sealedabstract.com

116 pointsmwcampbell16 comments

I found this part pretty funny:

>> These articles [about developer shortages] are greatly amusing to me, partly because I have this romantic notion of characterizing my fruitless search for a $1.50 car as a “car shortage” and being called for comment by NYT reporters.

If anything, we have a shortage of bankers and traders on Wall Street. If we just allowed more immigration, their salaries would come down to maybe only six or seven digits... ;)

This wonderful article lays out the idea that perhaps we as technologists and developers are undervalued.

It's a very strange thing, in some ways, because you find out that our utility to a business starting out and getting an MVP is quite limited--a dumb wordpress blog and cold calls can actually get you pretty far in many cases. But then, once you start scaling, the author's step function kicks in, and all of the sudden you really need to pay developers what they're worth (which is still not very much in the scheme of things).

I think that it's important to at least keep our minds open to the idea that we've shortchanged ourselves in the market, and that there are a lot of problems we're going to be having in the next decade or so if we don't educate the people who use the fruits of our labors.

My mom makes the same argument about housewives.

Weirdly enough Dwight Howard, Howard Stern and Larry Ellison also think they deserve better.

Survival of the fittest and all that...for the rest there are unions.

It's not quite so simple as all that--again, as the article states, we seem to have gotten into a point where the true costs of developing software or hardware are unknowable to anyone other than developers (if them).

We've already seen the bottom drop out of the mobile app market--this is not simply survival of the fittest. We seem to have given away too much while--more importantly--teaching too little.

Again, compare our state with doctors and surgeons.

Who is "we" and what have "we" given away?

If we refers to software developers, then you have to realize all software developers and software companies aren't created equal. Just as all doctors and hospitals aren't. Though they all go through 10 years of school only some end up in Manhattan in a penthouse with a view of Central Park.

That was certainly an interesting read. The costs of things is quite a conundrum in my opinion too... Photoshop - $600, yet many people are preferring to use apps on their phone that provide just what they need (colorization, liquify-type filters, cropping, etc). But back in the day there wasn't that much choice (and I guess that left piracy to fill in the void).

The other weird area is the app store: 99 cents (and freemium) is a model that depends on MANY people getting your app, otherwise it's very hard to make a profit. People don't mind paying for quality, but the low cost bar means everyone double-takes when they see an app for $5.99... yet on PC that would be very low for even an indie game or random trial-type-software. Also, app store discovery = major problem... but that's a separate issue lol.

So the takeaway of the article as far as I can tell is that technologists (it talks about software ones but you could abstract it out to all technology disciplines) aren't good at being powerful. Which makes sense. To be popular in high school, or to get elected, requires mastering the nuances of the social order, whereas being an engineer requires mastering the nuances of some technological problem domain. It's pretty rare for someone to have mastered both. Obviously there are exceptions but in the general case the article is right, technologists don't rule the world; they're the primary instruments by which others rule.

This echoes---in what I can only call poetry---the cries of countless developers/hackers suffering (hopefully vocally) through management issues at their workplace.

It links to another particularly blunt article that should be promptly forwarded to management in conjunction with the aforementioned one:

  http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-software-projects-are-terrible-and-how-not-to-fix-them/

A more rational "get a fucking clue" (assuming a certain level of respect toward you already exists).

This article has some misleading wording. It constantly refers to web browsers as billion-dollar programs in the sense that the total cost of all development, both intrinsic-to and inherited-by, modern browsers is in the billions. Yet it does this adjacent to comments on the unreasonableness of expecting new software for cheap. But new software isn't built in a vacuum - it's built on the existing technologies that already have the billions of dollars invested in them.

The author might still be right, but the point is exaggerated to incorrectness by such juxtapositions. For a post all about not being off by orders-of-magnitude, I find this misleading and inexcusable.

Given that Mozilla's budget is over $10M per year and Firefox has been under development for over 10 years, saying a browser costs $1B is off by less than one order of magnitude. Considering that the author is complaining about confusion of 5-6 orders of magnitude, I find this simplification excusable.

Mozila didnt start from scratch. It started by open sourcing what netscape was. So you need to add those costs/ years in the calculation. I mean even if they rewrote it completely, these man years should be added in the estimation of cost.

> inexcusable

Ask for your money back. Surely there's a writer out there who will meet your requirements at your price point.

Yet those numbers can be easy to achieve.

In many European countries, developers make between 1500 euros and 6000 euros a month. The amount per year additionally depends on how many salaries one gets (12 - 14).

So using the lowest value for salary and months, results in an amount of 18 000 euros a year.

Now one just needs to multiply this value by the amount of developers in the team and how long the software has been in development.

I am disregarding consulting rates, which tend to be higher.

Not to forget the extra costs of non-programmers in the company, taxes, office rental, water, electricity and all the other expenses business related.

I really agree that the cost between off the shelf software and custom software is too large.

We are trying to solve this type of problem by providing a framework developers can use to create general purpose templates. Those templates, a long with help on how to configure them, can be used to "slap on a feature or two".

It is an interesting problem to solve.

Excellent article. It's meanders through a multitude of topics. As a software developer this did instill some sense of self respect.

Beautiful article. Just beautiful.

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