
Ask HN: Why is development so expensive? - tlarkworthy
I feel like <i>anything</i> costs at least a million now. Is it just me or are software development costs increasing? If so, Why?
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thorin
Yeah, it's just a scaling thing isn't it?

Once you get past one or two people building an MVP suddenly you need a
project manager or a test team, or marketing, or finance team, or investors.
All of a sudden things start to go bad.

If you're an enterprise company you decide to outsource to get a small job
done and suddenly lots of extra people are added who are essentially overhead.
It seemed cheap and now it isn't. Or you decide to buy a product to fix all
your problems, but the business doesn't respect the limitations of the product
and you end up buying another, or spend all your pennies on integration.

I've worked on project teams from 1-100 and generally the most productive ones
have been with around 3-4 people.

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thedevindevops
In 'the olden days' programming projects were batch processing jobs on
mainframes and had simple requirements, simple processes and easily
predictable fail conditions.

Nowadays the all-singing, all-dancing one-stop-shop that has become the user's
expectation has pages and pages of requirements, complex processes and fail
conditions that could not only fill several books but are dependent on a whole
host of other systems.

In short, it's user expectations (which ironically is the same reason it's
more expensive to make a movie these days)

~~~
thorin
Don't worry, most projects in the olden days were over budget and time too.
The business normally manage to make things complicated enough to overrun the
schedule. I'm only able to go back about 30 years but Fred Brooks seemed to
agree.

What we don't have these days is large teams of career programmers that have
worked on the same systems and technologies within the same business or
industry for 10+ years, often supported by business people with the same
experience. This makes us more susceptible to consultants, marketing and
technology fads.

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drannex
Complexity begets originality.

As time progresses technology will become more complex and powerful. Where the
use of the technology may become simpler or the tools to produce make the work
easier, the overall complexity of the software will increase as time
continues. The amount of platform increases, the amount of users increases,
and the amount of edge cases increases.

When you couple this solemn fact with the idea that inflation has increased
what would have been tens of thousands of dollars of development costs in the
50s to the millions that exist now - the cost has increases as everything has,
and the complexity of understand and designing the system has increased more
alongside it.

If you consider that there are more developers than ever before who are all
competing on salary then the price of employment increases as well.

There are many reasons for your question, and really it all comes back to the
initial line.

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zikzak
I regularly spend a week or two on a project which immediately begins showing
increased revenue on the sites I work for, and that revenue accrues. I don't
think that is expensive at all. In fact, I think my company is getting an
incredible return on their investment in my labour. The same cannot be said
for startups but I feel like the VAST majority of software development is done
on projects where small changes are yielding increased revenue, decreased
labour costs, better compliance with regulations, etc.

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fagnerbrack
It costs so much mostly because programmers don't know how to write software
cost-efficiently. As everybody follows the same path, VCs start to believe the
cost is increasing when in fact it's the programmer's knowledge of cost-
efficiency software design that is decreasing. Take a look at this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-
SOdj4Kkk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk)

The costs to develop software are ridiculous and unrealistic. It turns out
that if enough people act as ridiculous and unrealistic that becomes the new
normal.

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softwaredoug
Could you add more to your question? I’m not sure it’s true costs are
increasing? And “anything at least cost a million now” - can you list any
specific examples of the kind of project you’re asking about? Just “software”
is a huge space TBH

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muzani
Cutting edge stuff is always expensive. There was a time when clothing, sugar,
and bread were expensive, high tech.

Personal and sales websites are cheap now. Blogs are cheap. Web infrastructure
is cheap.

Social media is basically an information superhighway. Compared to actual
highways they take more traffic and cost much less. Many other apps are
replacing middle men; Uber is quite cheap for something that is replacing the
whole taxi industry.

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quickthrower2
It's getting cheaper PER unit of utility. You can now create a lot of stuff
with "no-code" that was previously expensive.

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giantg2
Five people at an average salary of $100k plus about $30k each in
benefits/401k/bonuses is $650k. Then you have infrastructure costs, software
licensing, and overhead like utilities, management, legal, security, etc.

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rawgabbit
The technology stack was exponentially smaller and more stable. For me,
everything I needed to know were in three 300 page books. One was in JCL. The
other two were about the SAS modules that were installed on the mainframe, the
base SAS procedures and the book on how to write macros. The mainframe
predated the internet and was limited in how many characters you could input
per line. And you inputted one line at a time. But with it I could conduct
transactions around the world in real-time as long as the transaction was
limited to alphanumeric with very few special characters.

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s3b
Where did you get that from?

The tools, libraries, frameworks etc. we have now make it a lot easier to
build something that would have earlier cost a fortune in custom development.
If anything, it's getting cheaper to build projects now.

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k00b
I think the answer is that demand for development/developers is increasing and
even now we are far from peak demand/digitalization.

Even with the huge financial incentives supply of developers is constrained by
the mental capacity/desire to do the often time consuming and tedious task of
learning the development skills.

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meiraleal
I can develop a software for free, the costs are decreasing from my pov.

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onion2k
I see founders launching startups having spent _much_ less than that.

