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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

$2,500 for the machine, $7,500 for the fully loaded cost of the developer who spent three weeks getting the CSS exactly right. (Ahh, Mac developers. "The world needs all kinds.")

Still, even at $10k it is absurdly cheap relative to the value generated.

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I suppose you can achieve a certain kind of success when you turn every employee's action into an "ROIable" dollar value, but it sure makes for a miserable workplace.

I think he was talking about the cost to Panic of having a developer write the application, not how much they would've billed.

That miserable workplace probably makes the naive assumption that since no client gave the company money, the return on investment must be zero. Working in such a simplistic manner would be enough to make things miserable - even if they didn't put a dollar value on it.

  spent three weeks getting the CSS exactly right

two days tops.

Yea, this really isn't very complex markup or style -- especially considering they only coded it for webkit. It just looks like it would have been a lot of work because it's so slick and polished (typical of Panic).

Sure, but that's the difference between you and Panic.

You'd probably knock something very similar to that out in two days, probably that functionally served the same purpose.

Panic and Co. would rather spend a LOT more time on it to make it beautiful and captivating to look at, then spend a chunk of change on a fantastic monitor to display it on.

This is why people pay for Panic apps.

I am sure you don't know neither how I work nor how does Panic. And under "getting the CSS exactly" right I understand slightly different things from "getting the design right"

We don't get to see any of the CSS animations, which probably take a lot more time than static CSS.

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