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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Those rates really don't seem all that high. I mean 250 hour * 40 hours/week * 50 weeks year = $500,000. That's kind of a lot. Except then the article itself mentions employees getting a few million a year in stock from Facebook or Google.

I feel like there exists a market for getting start-ups launched on the right foot. Twelve weeks (480 hours) for $1,000,000 with a bonafide rockstar to get your concept not only up and running but well designed to be carried forward. Do you guys think people would pay that? If no, how much do you think people would spend?

If your idea is good and the work is good it would easily be worth it. Of course proving that you can deliver ahead of time is more than a little difficult.

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It depends on your definition of "rockstar" but your pricing appears high.

To share an anecdote: I was having a chat with a HNWI who wanted to "get into startups" about the cost of launching a product that he was thinking about (something similar in complexity to OpenTable). He had very high estimates in mind, something along the lines of what you're talking about and half a year.

I told him it was probably possible to do it much faster by employing experienced developers at a high hourly rate but whose experience would drastically cut both mistake time and planning time. He asked me to get him a quote, so I contacted two guys I knew from the functional programming meetups, both with PhDs and recently published papers, both with half a decade experience in a big famous company based in Silicon Valley, both having worked with each other on consulting projects for years, and they spent a week drafting a rough, serious quote.

The estimate came to around 25-40x cheaper than what you're talking about, and two months (part-time, on the side of their research work) to launch + USD 2k/month post launch to maintain it with no new features.

Of course, the HNWI changed his mind (in part due to a co-investor on another project who objected to the "high" estimate and told him to use free or cheap fresh grads instead... welcome to the world outside the US) and I profusely apologised to my contacts for having wasted their time, but it did put an order of magnitude on the "high quality contracting" idea.

I didn't understand consulting until a post on HN awhile back. It was a friendly guy who liked to hangout and chat with fellow devs. While visiting a city, Chicago I believe, he met up with coffee with a guy possibly also from HN. They talked, went back to the office, and he talked with another employee for awhile. The guy in question I believe had a background in SEO so he just kinda shared what he knew for 2 or 3 hours. Then they shook hands and went their separate ways.

A few weeks later he e-mailed back asking how much he would have paid if that friendly chat with an official consulting job. The answer was around $10,000. Yes it was only 2-3 hours of time, but built upon thousands of hours of experience. And the changes they could immediately implement would generate more than $10k in increased revenue so it would easily be worth it.

My point here is that it doesn't matter jack shit how many hours are spent on a project or how cheaply it could be done. What's infinitely more important is how much money can be made. If you can get more money out than you put in and putting more money in means you get more out then you put as much in as you can afford. Now for someone to plop down a million bucks on three months worth of work means they'd have to be unusually confident in a project's chances of success. So that number I gave is pretty high. However paying big money to a seasoned vet to get the ball rolling makes an unbelievable amount of sense.

Your recollection of the story is a little off, but it's close. The story you mentioned was from 5 years ago (2009). It was mentioned in a blog post in 20011 [1] and again in a podcast in 2012 [2]. It involved Patrick McKenzie (a.k.a "patio11" [3]) and Thomas Ptacek (a.k.a "tptacek" [4]). They are two of the most prolific contributors to HN [5].

Needless to say, times change. At present, Patrick's consulting rate is somewhere north of $30K a week [6], and dare I say it, I'm sure he's worth every penny of it for the right companies.

[1] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/07/08/business-psychology/ [2] http://productpeople.tv/2012/12/26/patio11-part2/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574541

I knew it was a prolific HN poster but alas I could not remember who. Given that the blog post was from 2011 I think that's forgivable! Well, maybe. Thanks for the links.

That would be patio11 and tptacek: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consultin...

I seriously doubt they would have been able to deliver site with complexity of Opentable in a couple of month even if working full time. Do they have track record of building sites like this in that short timeframe? In two month you could deliver something that will choke with 20 users, will have no failover or reliable backup, horrible db schema and will likely have unusable design. Anything else requires more time, meetings, people and research.

Even if it was their idea (aka no communication and decision overhead, working 16hours/day), two month is pushing it.

Considering these guys were working with petabytes/day scale web stuff beforehand (guess that narrows down the previous employer...), I'm sure they'd know, and that quote was for part time work, not 16 hours a day. I know both personally, have seen their code and previous work, and trust them to have given a pessimistic estimate.

If you have tight, modular code following good practices (e.g. a relational backend, not an ORM), you have experience doing it before, there's no micro-manager, and with a clearly defined, functional spec, you can build robust things that scale well relatively quickly. We're not talking about a new Facebook here, merely copying 80% of the functionality of an existing product for a launch in markets with no competition, as greenfield. Also, it's not like a site like that would reach a million users in a couple of months, nor would it win design awards, but why should it? It just needs to process transactions accurately and list a bunch of shops across a few countries.

I do think that the global market for programming talent is like that for real estate here in Singapore: I pay around 2 grand a month, and my neighbours across the street something like 8-10 for the same space. It is what it is. You'd be amazed how "cheap" it can be to hire a greybeard these days, sometimes less than twice a fresh Stanford grad...

I'm pretty skeptical, too. At Google or Facebook (or wherever they were), they were working on a small slice of a massive pie. Building a complex site like Opentable from scratch is a different creature altogether. Two months "part-time" seems pretty optimistic.

>It just needs to process transactions accurately and list a bunch of shops across a few countries.

Yes, I hear this kind of off-the-cuff assessment frequently from potential clients, and I turn them down if I'm not able to help them see the complexity often involved.

After all, opentable is a restaurant reservation system for the entire world.

>You'd be amazed how "cheap" it can be to hire a greybeard these days, sometimes less than twice a fresh Stanford grad...

This is true, and the open ageism among SV companies makes me incredibly sad.

Not only that, but simply keeping an existing system from crushing itself under its' own weight...

Knowing how/where you can effectively add caching, or even pre-aggregated data into an existing system can be the difference between a system going under, and being able to keep the single-instance database server from collapsing your business while a new system can be established.

Really? It's not like research is being performed where the answer (and how long to find it) is unknown.

Two months, with two experienced engineers should totally be enough. Sure it's not going to have all the bells and whistles but it should at least be a very very good better than MVP.

Charge for the quote as well. Especially if it is a detailed design.

Given that

(a) most start-ups fail,

(b) the reason for failure is very rarely due to some irreversible technical error in the early stages of development,

(c) the kind of quality a really good developer can offer is much more valuable later, when you've thrown out the initial junk implementation that got you some customers and need higher quality to start scaling up/out,

(d) you'd need serious outside investment to be able to afford even one person at that rate, and

(e) there are plenty of smart people who could and would produce a useful baseline product for a typical start-up in 12 weeks for a lot less than a million bucks,

I suspect you are being highly optimistic about the size of that market.

Do you guys think people would pay that? If no, how much do you think people would spend?

I know they wouldn't. Most bootstrapped start-ups have enough trouble keeping the power on for the first three months, and no start-up with experienced investors is going to take that kind of proposition seriously. Why do you think most start-ups are so keen to offer long-term, success-based compensation for employees who work crazy hours rather than offering real money at market rates for normal working days, and why do you think so many competent developers now insist on market rates and normal working days anyway?

If you're a freelancer/contractor/consultant type then taking on start-ups as clients is like being a small business trying to sell to students: they want the moon on a stick, but most of them have no money.

Dunno, I've seen the QT near a major university... plenty of market for things on a stick (or a roller/bun) so to speak.

If you would need 8 lesser devs to do what 2-3 very skilled devs can do, for only 2x-3x the amount.. you'd be surprised what the differences are... I've cleaned up enough code to know the difference.

It's pretty typical for Pivotal Labs to charge 500k to write up an MVP for a startup.

Good data point. Thanks! And I'd wager the quality of that work isn't particularly strong. So 1m for exceptionally high quality work seems plausible.

And good call on the price being for an MVP. It doesn't really matter how many people are working on it or, for the most part, how long it takes. You're paying for a product. If that happens to be done by one person or four then so be it.

The quality of Pivotal not being strong? That's nuts. Their code is top tier -- many of the best practices we take for granted were developed by places like Pivotal and Thoughtbot. If I had to choose between 100 hours of Pivotal bs 100 hours by a "rock star," Pivotal would be a quality (and likely safer) choice.

Why would you wager the quality of work from Pivotal wouldn't be particularly strong?

Code from these outsourcing shops is never particularly good. They sell on name, trust and client relationships - the product just has to work, and it usually does. They can't attract and keep top devs, who don't want to work on boring client projects, and won't pay to get them anyway.

They're inevitably junior-heavy, supervised by 2 or 3 year seniors, who do a reasonable job of keeping things in line but there's only so much you can do. The code ticks all the boxes for testing, etc, but is far from inspired and usually built with the present, not the future, in mind. There are uncomfortable organisational incentives to not over-deliver in quality - wouldn't want changes and maintenance to be too easy, and it's not like the client is tech-savvy or they wouldn't be hiring a "name" shop in the first place.

Most really good programmers who know their value (that I know, anyway) are working for product companies, where quality is visible, valued, and rewarded, or are highly-paid consultants/freelancers.

I'm not sure you know anything about Pivotal.

> I feel like there exists a market for getting start-ups launched on the right foot. Twelve weeks (480 hours) for $1,000,000 with a bonafide rockstar to get your concept not only up and running but well designed to be carried forward. Do you guys think people would pay that? If no, how much do you think people would spend?

I've been in this part of the market for a while (getting startups to launch). There are very few people who have that kind of money to drop on initial development, usually you're talking about 1/10 of that at most.

The companies that do have that kind of funds are not looking for an individual "rockstar", they're looking for a nice established company that gives them confidence and can be sued if things go wrong.

But your idea almost never is good. Your first prototype tends to simply open up discussions surrounding your problem area, which you can then iterate around until you have precisely defined the problem and solution.

This is why most startups "pivot".

A true rock star is not the guy who can code up a great system. It is the guy who can see the pivot coming before you ever start writing code, and get you on the right track from day one.

but as contractor you need to budget on only getting 35 weeks a year you cant guarantee that you will get a year long contract every time.

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