Listen to I just have to say this for everybody else out there there is no serverless design it's not like the fucking things running in JavaScript on the clients there are servers the whole name is stupid come up with a better name for service man it's not serverless God help us
I am certain we could easily create this using websockets and p2p browser data streams... whos coming with me? Crowd fund me and i will release a prototype
OK, I only ask for 10% of the profits for giving you the idea :)
Just kidding. I would definitely support such a crowdfunding within my modest means. The problem is that I don't think the tech is the main issue (after all, ICQ did it with 90s tehc). Obtaining an userbase is the main issue, and network effects go against new contenders.
That's actually a good point in the sense that when ICQ was popular most people didn't have a digital camera in their pocket with instant upload capability so sending a dick pic would have been way more trouble.
Maybe the fact that pretty much everyone has a digital camera in their pocket now means the world has changed into a world where ICQ as the OP described it just can't exist anymore
Definitely, the context changes and brings new challenges... but I don't think that's unsolvable. I can think of low-tech solutions (allowing only text, not pictures, until the other person explicitly allows pictures) and high-tech solutions (dick recognition via neural networks).
You know as a programmer myself for the last 15 years I can see how the market has changed and everything is becoming part of the global economy which means the rates are a lot lower which means Ukraine and India are playing a bigger and bigger role I could see private Equity trying to lower costs by outsourcing.
I think there's a fundamental flaw in the idea that you can just pay for cheaper labor- as Steve Jobs has said before the difference in a good programmer and an outstanding programmer can be 50 to 1 or 100 to 1 you can't capture that by trying to cut your cost from $100 an hour to $20 an hour.
Software inherently is one of the most scalable business models in the world the cost of manufacturing is almost zero all of the cost is in the design they should be able to make money. The mindset of being a consulting firm has to be changed.
Thoughtworks isn't cheap though. They sell the idea that outsourcing your work to them is outsourcing to an elite team. They do have teams in Brazil, China, etc, that are cheaper than their US based devs. But, those teams have rates much higher to end clients than a typical outsourcing shop.
That's what has me curious here. A PE firm usually buys when they think they see cost cutting opportunity. That may be hard to do with TW, since they pitch and price themselves as "premium".
A PE firm usually buys when they think they see cost cutting opportunity.
The PE firm buys things in which it sees opportunity. Often-times, the opportunity is to cut: the management team's adventurist streak in markets; weak products; bloated staff.
Other times, they might recognize that a company needs capital to get bigger faster in order to address an expanding market. In this case, I think the thesis might be: cloud deployments and migrations are exploding; ThoughtWorks has the thought leaders; "roll up" other consulting firms into ThoughtWorks; dominate the market. A friend's consulting firm was just bought for this exact reason. Something very similar happened to Pivotal.
This. I work with PE firms every day and this is essentially how they operate.
Consulting has notoriously low multiples and so if you couple a consulting business with a "computing/services" business you increase the multiple over night.
I expect this page to expand drastically over the years:
That's exactly what happened to Pivotal. Boutique consulting shop turned into a consulting/services behemoth by strategic investments and business flow.
The original Pivotal Labs was founded in 1989. Rob Mee sold to EMC in 2012.
A little later (circa 2013), EMC and VMWare took a number of teams and assets (notably Labs, Cloud Foundry, Greenplum, Gemfire and Spring) and spun them out into a new company, which was called Pivotal.
Pivotal is basically three divisions: Labs, Cloud R&D, Data.
Pivotal Labs is the consulting wing, there is a lot of cultural and conceptual overlap with ThoughtWorks. The Labs division is the most recognisably direct descendant of the original company Rob Mee founded. Its offerings and work have broadened over time.
Cloud R&D is responsible for Cloud Foundry (including our commercial distribution PivotalCF), KuBo, Spring, Pivotal Tracker and I always forget something or someone.
Data is responsible for Greenplum and Gemfire and a number of related technologies (eg HAWQ).
It's a complicated history, because nearly every part of Pivotal has a history that predates Pivotal.
Behemoth might be a little strong. I don't know how many of the employees are consulting/services vs product, but the total is 2300. They are also somewhat niche in their consulting. They won't do gigs that use stacks that compete with PCF for example, and have a very fixed model (your employees sit with them at the Pivotal shop)
My point about Pivotal was not about the investor; it was about the similar investment thesis.
the rabid cost cutting is pretty typical.
True, if the thesis is around bloat, mal-investment, adventurism, etc. If the theory is something like "tech talent roll-up in the face of an industry-wide cloud migration", then cabid cost-cutting would be disastrous (modulo all of the SG&A position eliminating)...
Very similar thing is happening with 'digital agencies' being bought by larger advertising agencies and big international consultancies, like Accenture.
Cost cutting / financial engineering / tax reductions / resource optimisation. It won't be a fun place to work in the next 3-5 years. That raise you think you'll be getting? Don't think so.
Many companies or brands have a reputation for quality built up by decades of producing a high quality product. Then the company hits hard times and the brand name or the whole company is bought by a PE firm. The firm tries to capture the purchase price and some profit by producing cheap, low quality goods under the "premium" brand name. Huge margins until people realize they have been duped. Not cool. See: Craftsman, Kodak, Polaroid, etc.
Well I wonder who the PE team is because perhaps they see value that exists intrinsically in quality programmers that know how to design software both quickly and at a high quality level and engineer it in a way that it can be built-in iterations and refined into a maintainable system.
For example someone like Joel Spolsky could probably find a way to drive profits from the TW team and so maybe its a programmer that knows business behind the PE money.
I have met plenty of very skilled Thoughtworkers. However the consulting model doesn't reward doing things right. It rewards things like selling the "A team", then swapping them out as you sell the next big client. And shortcuts that enable payment milestones, etc. They have zero incentive for what code does, how maintainable it is, etc, after they leave.
TW can deliver well, but you have to manage them closely.
Not really. The TW devs are mostly guaranteed to be competent without interviews. They also already know how to work together, have a shared idea of tools, methodology, lingo, etc. The "manage closely" part is around watching for people swapouts, architecture shortcuts, etc. That's managing their managers/architects vs the entire team.
From my experience in the last year-and-a-half I would say that the Consulting model is changing to one where the developer team is an outsourced arm from the business yet it's an invaluable part of the business. For example there's a company called clear measure who I believe are looking at driving the bottom line and creating a long-term relationship where growth in the client results in higher profits for the Consulting company through either raising their rates or some other agreement. I know personally as an independent contractor my Approach is to look at how I can affect driving business growth and not so much understanding what the client is asking for as a programming task
> looking at driving the bottom line and creating a long-term relationship
That's always been the case for large-scale consultancy: land a gig and keep it forever, or as long as it will last. It's the small ones who have an incentive to leave quickly, because they don't have the manpower to keep shackled to a single assignment for too long; but the big ones are body-shops, they have a virtually-infinite supply of fresh graduates to place - they will pull all the stops to keep the gig running as long possible.
> I think there's a fundamental flaw in the idea that you can just pay for cheaper labor- as Steve Jobs has said before the difference in a good programmer and an outstanding programmer can be 50 to 1 or 100 to 1 you can't capture that by trying to cut your cost from $100 an hour to $20 an hour.
Perhaps you left something out, but the argument that high quality programmers have to be expensive might be interpreted as assuming that high quality programmers only exist within high-salary countries like the USA. I assume you didn't mean it that way.
> 1) High end developers get paid a lot. Even in India and Russia.
> 2) As a rule of thumb consulting companies charge out at 3x wages.
This is backwards.
1) Consulting companies charge what they can get, which depends on what markets they've managed to penetrate, reputation, contract flow, etc as some markets are far better lubricated than others.
2) High end developers get paid a function of company budget and supply of talent, so in locations where budgets are more constrained, salaries will also be constrained. Your implication that "paid a lot" is a constant or near-constant is questionable.
There are lots of different datasets on this, no doubt none of them high enough quality, but they all indicate huge discrepancies, both on average and when stratified.
Is it possible to make a 100:20 saving as the parent comment questioned? I don't know. Perhaps not. On the other hand US average programmer salary is over 4x the average programmer salary in China, so under the right circumstances it's not as ludicrous as perhaps presented.
I guess my point is that your premise that "high-end" developer salaries are near-constant around the globe is likely only true if you constrain yourseld to developers who are employed at agencies that compete globally against companies like Thoughtworks and have employed there long enough to have established seniority (remember experience is not synonymous with quality). That's quite a tight definition of "high end" in my opinion.
> That's quite a tight definition of "high end" in my opinion.
High end always has to be in context. The current context is wage competition against US developers.
The open source dev working for free isn't in this market even if they are the best developer in the world.
My friends in India working for Microsoft and the ones working remote for $30/hr are in the same market.
> Consulting companies charge what they can get
3x is a rule of thumb. Charge much less than 3x and you aren't making money unless you have a much lower than average cost structure.
> On the other hand US average programmer salary is over 4x the average programmer salary in China, so under the right circumstances it's not as ludicrous as perhaps presented.
You are comparing apples and oranges.
Remember average in the US is average after a couple of decades of outsourcing.
This is stupid its funny how long I keep it going. It's a little stressful when your trying to get your characters quota typed out and you have to keep selecting other modal windows but all in all it feels like "I am on track" with my fake work life.
I live on Kauai. I moved here 5 years ago from Canada. I can tell you most people don't understand Hawaii has a much different culture, history and people than "mainland" America.
Mark is making a huge mistake. The people on this island in particular are much more community and heart based. The fundamental mistake Mark is making is that he is entering into a lose-lose situation. This will NEVER be forgotten and he will NEVER be welcome here. He will always have to watch his back while he is here.
In my opinion his best course of action is to stop all law suits and make amends. People will forgive him for making a mistake but only if he can admit it first. This is not California. The island will "spit him out".
Kauai is known for being the last island of Aloha. Good luck Mark.
> He will always have to watch his back while he is here.
What do you mean "watch his back"? People will physically attack or steal from him? Because that sounds like the kind of society any reasonable person wouldn't want to be a part of.
Your guess is as good as mine. What would you do to someone that used their money to take away home land that has been in your family for generations because you didn't have the right paper work to prove your ownership in a court of law.
Living out here you realize that the bodies are not buried in dirt.
I am 36 and been contracting full time since I was 22. Really I was only an employee at my first programming job. The concern that you have is of technology stack. The concern you are alluding to is how to stay relevant when being an older person.
The first concern is easy. Stick with some fundamentals. JavaScript for example is a perfect choice. By now we should all know JavaScript and another example is the Dom API’s. Those are solid gold. CSS of course and after that your good to go learn some cool framework like ReactJS.
Given that you know C then C# is likey to be your best friend. I have stuck with .NET since its release in Feb 2002 and always have been a productive developer. I have used every version of Visual Studio.
So after drawing a few boxes around things the world gets smaller. .NET was just ported to linux and renamed Dot Net Core 1.0 with it’s first release expected soon. So I would say .NET is as safe a bet as any. Of course there is the small challenge that .NET isn’t cool in the start-up world. That is mostly due to haters having to hate and not based on merit.
So the technology choices get easier and easier if you start to zero in. Dot Net has an MVC framework which is at version 6 but I think maybe renamed to Core 1.0 as well.
Your tech stack isn’t a problem. Stick with those and you will find something. As for your hourly rate I can tell you from experience the global market is making it very competitive so suck that up.
As for getting too old to program that is not actually the question. The question to ask yourself is can you find and follow your excitement. We are in the golden age. There are a few leading edge sources which deal with this. I love Bashar and Abraham-Hicks. To quote Bashar
“When you understand what excitement is, you'll understand why you don't have to look at every little detail to know what to do.
Your excitement is telling you that's the next thing you need to do. Following your excitement is actually the shortest path to what you want.
Act on your joy to the best of your ability. If you look at all your options and realize that taking a walk or driving your car or calling a friend is the most exciting, then THAT is the thing to do. When you can take no more further action on that thing, then look around for the next exciting thing you have the greatest ability to take action on and do it.
Excitement is its own self contained kit and its own driving engine.”
>As for your hourly rate I can tell you from experience the global market is making it very competitive so suck that up.
I haven't had much problem with this. I don't compete on price because I can't bid lower than someone who has a cost of living 10x less than mine.
One thing I've learned is that the higher your rates go, the less the global market matters. Few companies are willing to pay for $100+ an hour out of country contractors.
Even if you're not charging that much, you can always find companies who are just more comfortable with someone in country. Many companies want someone they can reasonably fly in if the need arises, or just someone who is subject to the same legal jurisdiction if things to completely wrong. IP theft is a huge problem in developing countries and legal remedies are very difficult when dealing with international disputes.
To draw a parallel, this is true in the housing market in my city: If you're competing with people for a $300k house, you will have 20-30 competing offers all in the first day the house is on the market. If you are in the $425k and up market, which has tighter requirements for getting a loan, then you will only have a few competing offers and the house may be on the market for a week before an offer is accepted.
>I haven't had much problem with this. I don't compete on price because I can't bid lower than someone who has a cost of living 10x less than mine.
The problem is that those 10x-less cost of living people can increasingly compete on quality too.
Without some sort of protection inside their own country, it's "yay" for businesses and "tough luck" for IT workers. The HB1 (or whatever) visa thing is part of that.
In the end, the situation is not good for those 10x cheaper people either, because it ensures they'll always stay 10x cheaper, as even if their country develops more, there will always be someone underdeveloped with 10x cheaper cost of living to bring their prices down too.
I agree that some labor protections are needed. However language barriers, cultural differences, and time zone gaps add enough of an overhead to communication that most companies willing to pay my rate won't hire foreign programmers just to save a bit of cash upfront.
Then you have the legal issues I mentioned. Contractors in other countries are for the most part outside the reach of US courts in the case of contract disputes.
.NET isn't cool in the start-up world because of the pricing and licensing issues. You can happily start developing a PHP+MySQL application on a used 100 EUR ThinkPad: good free IDEs are readily available (if you even need one), no licensing headaches and can start hosting it with your nearby 20 EUR/month web host with shell access.
Although the situation is changing for the better in the .NET world, the hardware cost, obfuscated licensing and pricing issues still remain. I had to buy an i5 machine with SSD and 16 GB of RAM to get the same development experience with VS2015 that I had with Netbeans on Linux with 4 GB of RAM. Also, a project in progress went for ASP.NET MVC 5 + Azure SQL on Azure and I'm afraid every day that we might get hit with some unexpected performance or insane pricing issues after the launch. Even the reddit thread on /r/dotnet wasn't very encouraging with regards to that: https://www.reddit.com/r/dotnet/comments/46rgf6/do_you_run_a...
I wouldn't lose sleep over performance problems. C#'s much faster than most of the other languages. Most of the ASP.Net MVC sites I've written have sub-50ms server responses even on tiny VPSes.
One of my old employers had 100s of installs of its VBscript, then ASP.Net, program, with a complicated salesforce-esque application that clients could customize themselves with extra code, so there was a wide range of code written by programmers of wildly differing ability. And they did all sorts of crazy stuff.
Almost all performance problems were SQL related.
In the 3 or 4 years I was there we had a bug with IIS once, some crazy specific thing, I can't remember it exactly but it would be like if you'd chose a very particular and obscure variable name and the value passed via query string was this one very particular value it would cause that thread to hang. Even that was fairly trivial to identify because a google search brought up an MSDN.
And when we were genuinely stuck by then we had some sort of partner status and could phone them up. When we were using silverlight when it first came out our technical director actually ended up chatting to one of their core programmers about a specific bug. I seem to remember this only happening with silverlight and with a very obscure tech we were using (some sort of strange clientside control that IE6 had that you wrote in vbscript that no-one really used that I honestly can't remember the name of now).
If your project depends on saving $500 on a computer (the one thing you really need to do you job, as opposed to say a carpenter who needs $5000 in equipment just as a basis), is that project really worth doing?
You willfully mixed up and misrepresented the 2 paragraphs of my post. I hope that wasn't with malicious intent, so I will clarify.
The first paragraph dealt with the 'poor college student in Eastern Europe' side of doing a project, where every dollar counts and must be scraped for. In that world, going for .NET was unheard of, but the situation is slowly changing with VSCode and vNext.
As for the second paragraph, even well-funded projects have limits. Sure, let's say the limit for cost is 50k EUR with 300 EUR/month expected hosting costs. How happy will your client be when your cloud provider changes their pricing scheme and hosting cost is now 10-100x as large? Or when the requirements change and you need to buy some $EXPENSIVE_PLUGIN for that and you are locked in with your technology stack to one provider?
Mainly speaking: why should someone make a company and build some website and fill applications and all that (always with the high possibility of rejection), when you can just do 'apt-get install <technology-stack>' or as an alternative, git-clone-configure-make-sudo-make-install for the same thing? It's all about barriers to entry.
No, but building your project in a language that currently costs 2-10x per production instance with licensing/hosting costs thrown in sure as heck can.
I love C# compared to Java but I write more Java today because I hate Windows and want no part of automating cloud deployments to Windows target servers. So maybe one day when (soon?) .Net Core gets production ready in Linux I'll make the jump- but I'm not going to vastly increase my hosting costs for a language when all of the others can be done on a cheaper, more well suited system.
I don't think that's true any more - Microsoft have made lots of inroads recently that are starting to attract mindshare (Visual Studio Community is awesome and free; .net is open source etc). Even if it IS true, you should be free to call people out on it. HN needs to stay as a place where people can discuss things civilly. Disclosure: I work at a .NET shop, but am personally more interested in Python, Elixir etc
- Rob