Ask HN: Why nobody cares about good engineering rather than how to reduce costs?

Your whole mindset is wrong. Think of it from the perspective of people you are cold calling. They arent engineers, all they see is the finished app or website. They just want somwthing that works. When you buy laundry detergent, do you care about the active ingredient or how it was produced? All you care about is does it clean your clothes. These are small companies not looking to scale, so good engineering doesnt lead to greater sales. It doesnt add value

Also I'm going to assume English isn't your first language. If you are to English speakers you really need to work on your language skills

I'm also going to be brutally honest if you have 12 plus years experience and you don't understand the nature of business then perhaps you should have someone help you on that end because understanding why people don't need great engineering

>These are small companies not looking to scale

And this also separates what people call "startups" from small companies. All startups start out as small companies, but they don't comprise all small companies. They look and follow the value that will require them to grow.

I think, indeed, that a company must value engineering if they want to grow really big. If they don't, then engineering/tech is not made a priority.

Even if you want to grow really big engineering isn't always a factor. Startups shouldn't be wasting resources worrying about scaling until they have a decent product. Early on quick iteration times are much more important. As long as things aren't so bad that the code base prevents changes fast and cheap are a reasonable approach for a brand new startup.

> These are small companies not looking to scale

I actually disagree that the only reason why a business would need engineering like this is to scale.

That is a reason, and if that's the reason, these businesses will not need it.

However, there are plenty of other reasons. Automation and engineering of various business processes exposes issues throughout your structure, can safe hundreds of man-hours, and can produce better product than people can.

Much of my business is automating the generation of various reports. It may only save the business 10-20 hours a month, but you know these reports are solid (if the data is input correctly).

It takes the focus OFF the reporting and puts it ONTO the data: where it should be.

That's worth the 10-20k per app 10 times over.

I don't mean this to be harsh, I mean it constructively. You need to work on your writing skills. Your three paragraph post has quite a few errors and some clumsy wording. You may be coming off as unprofessional and this could be hurting your prospects.

I believe you should accept that you are doing sales and practice for that. What you are perceiving as lack of regard for your good engineering skills might be only your own lack of regard for acquiring sales skills.

And if you are selling at anexo English speaking market, I also agree a lot with teovall's comment that you must improve your writing skills. I am not a native english speaker and Grammarly helps me a lot. I highly recommend this software for improving your writing in english.

if you cold call me just to tell me that my codebase is not good enough for you to even touch, im not going to be interested.

your english isnt exactly stellar either.

if you want to make my code better, that doesnt add value. the bad code clearly works. or else I wouldnt be in business. "good code" is irrelevant. if that makes your heart bleed, welcome to the real world.

every tech ipo ever has bad code. twilio has bad code. dropbox has bad code, uber has bad fucking code. maybe google doesnt. mighty google has no bad code. you bet facebook is a load of shitcode. maybe not anymore, but for the first decade? easily.

do you think mark "3 week mvp" zuckerberg gave a shit about code quality? the guy was studying liberal arts.

ask any YC partner. code quality doesnt matter.

if you can get shit done, however, youre going to be the shit.

Welcome to the indie game.

The first realization is that despite you have 12+ yrs of experience it's only functioning as a tiny cog in a larger operation whereby most of the work was out of sight and out of mind for you.

Everything from advertising to marketing to sales to business management to account management to billing, to project management, to development to deployment to support now falls on your shoulder.

And guess what, engineering for most businesses are the least expensive line item.

You probably want to match your last salary, so say you were making $150k/yr then really you have to find $200k for 2000 billable hours. That's $100/hr.

In terms of contractor rates that's pushing towards the top end of the market when most devs are hovering around the $25 to $60/hr range.

So really, to make that $100/hr billable rate you will have chase a lot to deliver that kind of value.

Most small-medium sized business aren't interested in nursing an engineer/developer/consultant for $16k/mo. They'll only be interested in maybe a half-day or day rate.

Even then the only value add you can bring to the table is to reduce costs for them. No one cares about how much effort or work you put in. You're not an employee to them. You are the consultant. They're purchasing an end product.

You either get real quick at being efficient or you're gonna wash out.

Large sized business would rather hire unless you possess some specialization they lack or is under market. So you have to punch above your weight class. Are your skills really worth $200/hr? If so, then you have the means to get those jobs by offering $100/hr. But, then again, if you were able to get that type of pay you would have just gotten a job.

To be independent, cashflow management is now the most important thing. Followed by your sales management. To then lastly your engineering skills.

All in all, it's likely your first 1 to 2 year you'll be making far under market until you've established a roster of clients.

The inevitability is that you'll have to turn to an agency model and hire others to scale. Which presents another series of problems to your plate. At that point you might as well just be another business manager hiring out technologists contractors who are trying to convince you that they're worth $100/hr that you then have to flip and sell for more than that.

Good luck.

Have you ever thought that thse companies need you because their code bases are absolute messes?

If their code were 100% intuitive and elegant they probably wouldn't need you.

From my POV, the problem with consulting is that large companies either recognize how important software is for their success and develop it in-house or are foolish enough to outsource it to large consulting players (IBM, Accenture, some Indian firms). They mostly have no interest in a tiny consulting shop, which is a shame for you, because they have tons of money to spend. Unfortunately, this leaves you mostly serving all remaining parts of economy (mid and small companies, software startups etc.), which is far less juicy. Interestingly, in my country (Poland) some large corps (a large telecom for example) are open to throwing a smaller and less important projects towards a newcomer - but for an unattractive, fixed price (they want to see if you can deliver on the same level as the big players, but for much less). So again, you're being squeezed.

Of course, all of this is true assuming you're doing commodity software development. I imagine it's very different if you have an expert niche knowledge that is in demand (like security perhaps?).

Good engineering does reduce costs. Or it increases revenue. Those are the only two things that make engineering "good" in the eyes of those who pay for engineering services.

> Right I just have one permanent project and just lost one more because of lack of motivation to contribute to some of the worst code bases I have ever seen.

That is going to be a big problem. There are a lot of shitty code bases and as a consultant you are going to have to clean up the mess. If you don't think you can stay motivated perhaps you should try and pivot to another idea, perhaps taking into account your experience you could create dev tools to sell.

I guess it's because we the engineering community have done a bad job of explaining to outsiders how good engineering can reduce costs.

> because of lack of motivation to contribute to some of the worst code bases I have ever seen.

Your job as a consultant, if you're working on existing projects, is to fix this. This is where you'll be making your money. By fixing their crap codebase.

You wouldn't have much work without products like this.

Unless lives or money is at stake nobody cares about code quality.