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Comment by redleggedfrog | Hacker News Reader

From everything I know about software development, I can't imagine anything of value being created under such circumstances. 50% of software development is not coding. I suspect what is getting created is crap, but crap that can be leveraged to make money and get that 3 billion to keep going up.

That's the sad part about the article to me - at one time the emphasis in computing was, well computing. In our modern age, it's money.

Glad I was there for the good part.

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That's the thing, from the article it appears that absolutely nothing of value is created by these portfolio companies. Instead, ESW is buying companies who have done all the hard work a long time ago (using highly-paid creative employees) and feasting on whatever revenue they still produce while cutting costs and paying contractors just enough to keep things operational.

I've seen my fair share of guys like him. They get rich by buying the crap that people don't want and doing the crap that people don't want to do. You hated them because you felt like it went against the laws of the universe for these sorts to be so successful. You never envied them though, because you realized that these people had miserable lives despite being rich.

As long as these people are looked down on more than they're looked up to, I think we're fine.

My thoughts exactly - crystallized much more succinctly and elegantly than I could have muddled them out.

Trilogy also created a great deal of crap. They came to my engineering school in the late 1990s and handed our student society $500 just to give us a free lunch.

Many of my friends went to work in Texas for them, only to escape a while later after toiling away on projects for fortune 500 companies which were massively overbilled. Their formula was: hire new grads, pay them well and take them to parties, and soak big corps with dot com projects they neither needed nor understood.

The article is correct in pointing out that many Trilogy grads went on to do great things. But this was not Trilogy’s doing. It was because these people are smart and would have succeeded anyhow.

As for the new strategy of paying $15/hr for sweatshop C++ coders... I can only imagine the quality of that code. You get what you pay for.

Just a note on wage:

$15/hr for C++ coders will get you a highly-talented coder from poor parts of the World who may rival your above-average C++ coder in developed countries.

$15/hr is still a very good wage in poor countries.

You probably never tried working with remote parties.

It's not that easy and you can bet that some hours are just doubled as well.

Adding to that: 15/hr is a decent wage in many countries, but you'll be paying at least 30 due to overhead and a middleman which will be the one really profiting.

And the middleman might bait and switch you on a 7/hr junior coder.

For $15/hr, you do not get top quality C++ developers from any corner of the world. I know - I've worked for companies that have tried. You tend to end up with a spaghetti code base utilizing crappy open source or shareware libraries that a cousin produced. Then, you try and scale, and need to bring people that actually know what they're doing.

2 years in at current job, where most of the work was done by offshore devs, company now has a team of onshore developers to fix all of the performance and stability problems.

I don’t agree with the false equivalency of open source or shareware meaning a lib is crap.

There is a lot of variance in $15/hr offshore developers. For example, you can buy a shirt for $10 in various places in the world, some of them will be total crap and some of them will be exquisitely tailored. The selection becomes the challenge and just because someone failed doesn’t mean someone else did.

And this company seems to have cracked the system for finding, training and managing those people. I suspect many poor offshoring examples fail because those processes were poor - and expensive.

$15/hr now . . . and $150/hr to fix it later.

No, dude, you're wrong. 15 an hour doesn't get you a skilled and experienced freelancer / contractor anywhere in the world. Good quality costs. Everywhere. It is cheaper than in the States, but not that much. If you're looking to hire someone good, expect to pay like 40 an hour, at least.

No way. I recently put together an off-shore dev team. We interviewed folks in Mexico, Poland, the Philippines, China, and India. The quality differed and the price differed, but not by huge amounts. No one charged $15/hr for a decent developer. $30-50/hr was the norm.

This comes up every time there's a talk about remote work. Why would a highly-talented coder accept this wage instead of looking for some other remote options?

I recall a friend back in the late `90's commenting negatively about Trilogy's recruitment activities. I have no doubt their workplace culture left a mark on Austin.

A skid mark.

It sounds like ESW is buying companies where the creative work was finished years ago. The policy appears to be freezing innovation and cutting costs to profit from existing contracts. I suspect the goal is not longevity. It’s also uncertain the company under highly paid and creative stewardship would not also fizzle out after a decade or two.

It's pretty much what private equity companies have been doing with aging enterprise software firms but taken to the next level re replacing virtually everyone.

There's still plenty of demand for good developers, it's simply that the amount of code written has increased enormously and is being provided by a more democratised system. The person bringing into existence‡ that app for your local pizzeria probably doesn't even need to know what an A* search is, but doesn't need to either. There's even a change it's reasonably secure with your CC info by using some library from the CC clearing companies‡‡

There is a separate and unrelated problem that your bank may also be outsourcing its app to these lightly-trained developers, but that's the bank's poor choice.

‡ I avoided the use of "write" though that's still the case, but in the longer term the app will pretty much be written a la frontpage or powerpoint, or even more high-level (some AI app that just asks some questions and spits out most of the app).

‡‡ I know, I know, but a nerd can dream, can't one?

"The person bringing into existence that app for your local pizzeria..."

I don't think that's what's going on at Mr. Liemandt's Code Grinders as it would be completely impractical.

The pizza place would most likely need a lot of help in having something useful built for them, website or app. It would take hours and hours of back and forth to get their business requirements nailed down. Communication, and trust, are the key elements at this point.

Then when development starts, your going to need to show them progress, get feedback, and revise. Then you're going to need to do QA side by side with the pizzeria to make sure you've met their needs.

Picture this all happening through email, or Slack, or some portal with someone in another country, with ESL, and maybe a different time-zone. I've seen it, and I tell you what happens. When it's all said and done the pizzeria takes it to someone they can sit at a table with and figure out how to fix/use/abandon it.

And those payment gateways? Don't get me started. Even PayPal, a huge company with lots of resources, has a terrible muddle for their APIs. There are exceptions, but I've always been surprised by payment gateways lack of quality.

Edit Added an "and"

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