"Hey, I hear you're a programmer! That's great, because my buddy and I have this idea for a business. We have everything important figured out, and all we need is a programmer to throw it together."
The sheer number of times I have been approached with this same phrase... 😂
I fell for it once, high school friend, seemed like a reasonable idea, I was early in my career and looking for experience. I did learn a lot but ultimately the business failed before it started and I got paid a few 100 for nearly as many hours work.
Good article, but I'd guess the reality is more like 25-50x as much work as non-technical people assume, and a good interface takes about 5x the work of everything else.
They don't merely underestimate the non-interface work, they greatly underestimate the interface work as well.
As a rough estimation, if you include everything (apperance, discussion, functionality, interaction with other controls, …) I would say that every single input field or button is about a day of work. And then you start to realise how many buttons there is in any GUI and how much it will cost.
The three points
- software is easy to write
- in a business, the software is the icing on the cake
- software developers are cogs in a machine, or interchangeable components of an assembly line
These are pervasive within business. There's a strong divide between business folk and workers. To business folk, they are the major part of the business. Without them, the business would not exist, therefore they deserve the higher salaries, the big cars, the nice yachts, the position, the power, the wealth. Workers of any kind would be mindless drones that implement and execute business dictations, therefore they may be replaced at will, and pay vs worker happiness can be min-maxxed.
If we want to change that dynamic, these kinds of people ("hey bro, I have this idea you can implement for me for free") should not be allowed to become business owners. Worker-owned collectives should be the future.
This isn't a software thing. This is people filtering for suckers. They want to find other people to do their work but they want to keep the value created from that work.
This is why I don't even ask for details anymore, just 5x my current salary with at least a 2 year contract
