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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Two years of support for $176,800? What a bargain! As long as this old system gets the job done it seems like an extremely cheap way to go.

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"There are millions of records and roughly 150 databases built into the system, each designed to address different unit and personnel needs." - yeah, good luck replacing that for less than $90,000 a year.

1. Notes -> CSV -> MySQL

2. Hire someone in another country for below minimum wage

3. ...

4. Profit

Exactly how many terrible software project disasters start...

Exactly, I don't see the problem? That's cheap. I'm sure when they switch off of lotus notes it'll cost several million.

The problem is that Baltimore PD apparently thinks custom enterprise IT is something you should be able to buy at the Apple store. They're going to be in for a really rude awakening one day. Maybe we can send 18F over there to do some pro bono work.

18F?

I think they are talking about this: https://18f.gsa.gov/

I believe they are the team that turned around the Obamacare website in record time after it was on track to crash and burn.

Both 18F and USDS (US Digital Service).

It's not pro bono if your salary is taxpayer-paid.

I think 18F only really works at the Federal levels (please correct me if I'm mistaken). But there might be some Code for American fellowship people who could be embedded with the city.

Bargain? That's practically highway robbery (taking from the developer that is)! A developer making shitty modern react apps can make 180k a year with a bit of effort.

And I have no idea how many lotus maintainers there are left in the world. Definitely not that many.

Not many new ones being minted, but plenty existing ones I am sure :).

>A developer making shitty modern react apps can make 180k a year with a bit of effort.

Living in an area with million dollar homes and 3k rents, sure.

Unless you bought your house 10+ years ago for a third the price. So one can make shitty modern react apps for $180k a year with a $300k home you nearly paid off.

If I could go back in time 10+ years I'd be putting all my money in bitcoin and Netflix

If only $36,000 of those 180k are going to rent, that's not a bad deal.

That's sharing a studio with someone or a 1BR with 3 others. When you actually factor in costs by all metrics you're better off making high 5-figures or low 6-figures in any non-urban area than you are being anything but the top 2-5% of software developers in the Bay Area.

Rents in San Francisco are very high -- high enough, in fact, that this silly, obviously-false hyperbole is unnecessary.

So you're claiming studios are $6000 and 1BR's are $9000? You can get a 1000 sqft for < $3000 within a 1 hour commute of SOMA.

A 1 hour commute costs you 2 hours a day. That's almost like working an extra 7 weeks a year with lower productivity and increased wear and tear on you.

who's debating that?

2 hours is about how long I spend at the gym every day and I'd hate to give that time up.

If you're spending more than ~50 minutes at the gym you're doing something wrong.

What a deal!

When you can make $200k straight out of undergrad, yes, it is.

There was an article floating around earlier this week that goes into the numbers of this: https://priceonomics.com/the-places-in-america-where-all-you...

You have to add income tax to your calculations. 180k in SF is about %60 of that, which is 108k, so exactly 1/3rd.

>! A developer making shitty modern react apps can make 180k a year with a bit of effort.

Only in an economy that runs on monopoly money. Baltimore isn't SV.

Baltimore is in striking distance of the DC area, where salaries aren’t known for being paltry due to federal largess.

Yes there's upward pressure on pay (and the cost of everything that pay buys) from the DC area but the DMV is no SilleyValley in terms of pay and costs.

Pay, definitely not (I live within extended commute distance and have gotten offers for senior dev at $80k and similarly insulting numbers) but it's pretty up there in terms of COL.

Wow, those companies definitely are low-balling (especially for a senior position in the DC area). Were those positions ones that required a security clearance, though?

Federal workers don't get paid particularly well, actually. There's some competition among contractors especially if you have active clearance but nothing approaching SV.

Umm, I know plenty of people in the Baltimore area who are pulling in that kind of money for Rails and Django apps.

I see nothing in the article that suggests this is a single person's full time job.

In that case this is an even bigger steal!

> Computer & Network Consultants’s David Alonge, who is responsible for programming and maintaining all of the Police Department’s Lotus Notes applications, told The Sun that the software is “working wonderfully for the police.” He said it runs so smoothly that it isn’t necessary to bring in someone else to help manage it.

That makes me think it's even more likely not his full time job.

If it's running well, he might never have to touch it. We sell some Notes-based products with some considerable customers (still!) and only get a couple emails a week or month. Annual support and maintenance fees just keep rolling in.

There's a lot to be said about legacy systems that just work.

Or that the Baltimore Police don’t mind it running badly - given some of that department’s troubles, having the odd document vanish might be beneficial to them.

I have every confidence that they're expecting 60-70 hour weeks for that.

Are you familiar with the Baltimore Police Department's RFP and procurement processes? Because companies and governments have paid a lot more for a lot less.

Good, senior, full-stack devs make $90,000-125,000 in flyover states atm. And I do mean good ones. A lot of people are stuck at $80,000ish.

$180,000 for a front end tech lead is unheard of in said states. Architects make maybe $160,000.

150-160... flyover state :)

Baltimore isn't exactly in a flyover state. There's upward salary pressure from all the money shoveled into the DMV area.

hahahaha at Maryland being a flyover state now. With it hosting several of the richest counties in the entire country, and like all of the federal government and contractors that can't fit inside DC city limits.

Just because the customer is in Maryland doesn’t mean the dev has to be.

Hey I'd be happy to get $70,000 but I'm stuck having to take care of family so I have to stay in the middle of bufu egypt. Trying to find remote consulting gigs but they're hard to find!

Most companies will offer to pay for the relocation of you and your family, along with your home, from Egypt to wherever you want to move.

I don't think "most" is a fair statement.

A more accurate statement would be "Many large silicon valley companies will pay for your relocation if you are an exceptional developer for the price."

GP probably doesn't actually live in Egypt, but was probably referencing the expression "Bumfuck, Egypt", which means out in the middle of nowhere.

Nevertheless, his relo won't be paid for unless he's a God-tier, exceptionally desirable developer.

Relocation for new hires isn't rare. What are you talking about?

Contractor could make that, which is what I thought was meant by "with a bit of effort".

The PHP and Ruby developers I worked with ten years ago in DC were making that much, and the good ones were making significantly more. I haven't been involved in state-side web development since then, but I imagine that regional salaries are - significantly - higher at this point.

What do you consider a “flyover” state? From the major cities I know that are not on the west coast, New York City, or DC, $125K is around the top for a “Senior Developer” and $145K is near the top for architect level skills who don’t have any direct reports.

$125K is near the top for a Senior Developer in Charlotte, SC, circa 2014 (flyover? Probably). Probably higher there now, and definitely higher in NYC or DC.

Same thing I’m seeing in Atlanta. I haven’t seen too much of a change since 2014.

$125 seems about mid or upper mid range for Sr Devs based on data from Salary.com. Architects can make over 170K on the top end. Not sure how recent your data is but there's a real crunch for talent up here these days.

It depends on the market. Atlanta for instance is showing $130K median and 144K st the 75%. No that’s not accurate.

But it’s also showing 141K at the 50% percentile and $159K at the 75% for a Software Engineer V. That’s more accurate.

Another data point for different cities....

https://www.matrixres.com/resources/salary-survey/

I believe you answered your own question. When there aren't many individuals left in the world with the associated expertise, and when a younger developer sees no growth potential for learning this expertise, you probably will have to pay more a la supply & demand. That said, this doesn't seem particularly high. My guess is a migration would easily cost seven figures. However, sometimes delaying the problem is really kicking the can down the road to when there are even fewer people with lotus expertise.

if he plays it right, he will have an easy job for life

I was expecting way more. That's less than the salary I would expect them to pay a sysadmin over 2 years.

I was thinking that was low for _one_ year when you consider that it's a contract position, so the consultant is on the hook for self-employment taxes and health insurance and such.

You're on the hook for income tax where I live regardless of whether you're contract or employee. I'm a contractor so my only additional cost is really health insurance (much cheaper in Canada since the basics are covered by the government, like $150/m for a good plan) and Quickbooks.

You are in the US as well. We have FICA (social security, medicaid, Medicare) of which half is paid by the employer and half employee. If you hear "self employment tax", that's typically referring to the fact that you're paying both sides (15.3% over 7.65%).

There are a few more nuances, but that's the gist of it.

Thanks. The state (or most states) tacks some on as well, right? If I was not self-employed my employer/client and I would be paying into Employment Insurance and Canadian Pension plan as well, but I'm able to skip that as I own more than 20% (don't recall the exact percent they require for exemption) of the corp I work for. There is also 13% sales tax but I stack that on top of my hourly. I can claw back some of the sales tax by claiming the tax I paid on business expenses.

Oh yes, I was only covering federal taxes. To my knowledge, the general structure in most states doesn't matter. I don't know of any states where income taxes are partially paid by the employer and partially by the employee (like FICA).

Seriously. This is an epic installation:

> Officers tap into its databases to track criminal investigations, check arrest data, log ballistic test results and identify “troubled officers,” along with various other uses. There are millions of records and roughly 150 databases built into the system, each designed to address different unit and personnel needs.

I also enjoy how baltimoresun.com totally defeats uBlock Origin and brings my computer to its knees. http://archive.is/QZ3q9

... but then the next paragraph paints a different pictuere,

""" It found that the “siloed nature” of the Lotus Notes databases made it difficult for officers to match, verify or search for information. It also found that various systems may contain conflicting information about the same case, or may not reflect the most complete information. Downloading or querying data is made “difficult, if not impossible” because it isn’t inputted in a standard way across databases. """

The contract was awarded to the initial company that built out the holistic platform in 1996 so you've got to wonder how much it has cost them over the last 22yrs.

This kind of legacy stuff makes my stomach turn.

Calling this a "system" or "platform" is probably being very generous. It sounds like a very loosely related glom of Domino databases that grew up organically, probably with a little custom UI sprinkled on top. Notes can be infamous for that kind of thing, worse than Excel even, since it is more powerful...

Most definitely - the systems apparently "talk to each other" throughout the day whatever that may mean in their case.

I once worked for a company where the software that ran thier back end was written in Powerbuilder by contractors in 1999. The two developers who were there had been there for 20 years supporting the system and writing stored procedures.

You might want to double check your setup. I disabled Pi.Hole and reloaded the site with just uBlock Origin running. I did this a couple times with cleared cache, it pulls 22-24 requests and loads in ~1.9s.

> I also enjoy how baltimoresun.com totally defeats uBlock Origin and brings my computer to its knees.

Try blocking sdad.guru. I checked and it's one I've blocked myself, and Google says they're an adblocker-circumvention service.

In Lotus Notes (yes I had the misfortune to use it) "database" is really something more like a "structured file". It's quite a lot different from a SQL database, and 150 of them is not a lot. The system I worked on had 10000s (although admittedly it had a very peculiar design even for Notes).

Some of the less reputable and saltier ad networks intermittently run a malware service that does a DoS on clients running blockers. 'uBlock Origin Extra' is a standalone tool by the same guy that works for me against it.

That developer way undersold themself. They should have asked for a minimum of $200,000 a year. That's a huge system. I am sure they are bound to get lots of late night emails and fires to put out.

Kudos to Baltimore police for good business. The system works, and to upgrade or replace it would cost millions.

$176k is some tiny percentage of what they'd have to pay IBM for the same thing.

I'm sure when an article like this runs, their IT department is getting bombarded by cold calls from vendors offering to upgrade them.

While the headline seems like a lot of money, it makes me realize how thin the margins are becoming on these tech services.

Full stack is still safe right?

Whilst $176k of IT services wouldn't get you far, it would likely be enough to buy user seats on a SaaS product. Not to mention this software probably sucks and there is a big opportunity cost with detectives wasting time on using dated software. If you spend $2M on software that saves you $3M in payroll on overtime because your detectives are wasting hours per week on case management, then $176k isn't a bargain anymore.

I worked on a project where we were trying to modernize it with a fancy web UX. All the old timer users (people working at the insurance company for 20+ years) were used to working with the old version that was mainframe-based where they'd be opening flat files, and entering data, etc. they were really efficient at it. They knew all the keyboard shortcuts, etc. These weren't educated people, but by rote learned their jobs, well. They hated the new web-based, fancy UX that was built for them. So, I could see how the old-school accountants couple probably be pretty efficient at Lotus....

i wonder whether some of those vendors (may be some one who already has hands deep in that city IT pockets) gave the tip to the reporter and thus it is a "submarine" of an article to force the police department to upgrade and to provide PR cover for it.

It's actually not bad, given the way spending usually goes in government in the US. Roughly the cost of one decent engineer's salary in Baltimore (for that two years). I might have expected closer to $500,000 for two years instead.

Yeah, that's very cheap for keeping the light turned on a vital system running the police department of a big city.

Agreed, this doesn't seem overly expensive by any means. But worth noting this is just one developer's cost. Doesn't including licensing/support costs for Domino/Notes itself, hardware to run it on, sysadmins for the servers.

(And I don't know what platform they're using, but it does run on all of IBM's OSes: AIX, i5 (i.e. OS/400), and z/OS. Wouldn't be surprised...)

Notes and "gets the job done" on the same phrase don't go together

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