Comment by FullMtlAlcoholc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FullMtlAlcoholc | Hacker News Reader

FullMtlAlcoholc

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

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.

>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.

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