

Results of: 7 developers, working 24/7 for 90 days, 1 house (in Colombia) - andreshb
http://alexander.letmego.com/2009/07/29/how-productive-was-the-letmego-immersion/
Colombian entrepreneur Alex Torrenegra hired a small team of developers and for 90 days, they worked every waking moment, and except for one family weekend break, they did not leave the house. Food and other logistics was taken care of by another company. Here he tells how productive the experience was.
======
run4yourlives
Hopefully helpful critique regarding the business itself:

1\. I'm not sure about Americans, but "lodging" translates very poorly for
this Canadian. It's not that I don't understand it, it's just that people
don't really use the word here. "Rooms" or "Beds" would be a better bet.

2\. I'm questioning why I as a traveller would bother to "bid" on a room that
I may know nothing about. Seems like a win for the hotelier, but a lose for
me. I can stay at a hostel or hotel chain and have a reasonable expectation of
what to expect. I can't do that at a B&B, but I can compare prices to get an
idea of what would be up scale and what would be bargain basement. This site
disables that, and brags about it. I really don't need to save $5 that badly.

About the process:

I think - humbly - that sometimes us geeks can get so caught up in the process
of how we're building something that we lose sight of what it is we're
actually building. This doesn't matter when you're making lego structures as a
hobby, but it's completely relevant when you're trying to design a business.

How you do it is - in the end - largely irrelevant. Yes you can argue about
productivity or the best way to get the most hours out of a day, but extremes
aside it is not going to be what matters to your customer. I don't care if you
used agile and got your product up in 10 hours or if it was a disastrous
waterfall plan that needed to be redrawn 6 times and took 6 years to complete.
I care about the product, and what it can do for me.

In this case (and I mean this respectfully) I get the impression that the
process was the focus and the product was the afterthought. There's nothing
wrong with that specifically, but it certainly shows through.

~~~
torrenegra
Thank you for reading the post. I must clarify that travelers are not bidding.
Instead, the lodgings bid for the itineraries of the travelers.

Additionally, we, at LetMeGo, use the word "lodging" because we are not only
limited to hotels, beds, or rooms. We also cover vacation rentals, tents, and
pretty much any place where you can sleep. "Lodging", which is the abstraction
of all these, is not a common word because most online services only offer one
type of lodging: hotels, or rooms, or vacation rentals, etc. That, hopefully,
will change, as more options equals more competition and lower prices.

~~~
run4yourlives
>Instead, the lodgings bid for the itineraries of the travellers.

Ah, I see. That wasn't evident to me. The way it was described seemed to be
that travellers were bidding on open rooms and highest bid won.

Your way is interesting, but I'm not sure what benefit it offers me as a
traveller. In order to drive the service you'd need to create a market of
travellers eager to provide the products to bid on. I'm having a hard time
understanding why I would do that on the surface.

Also, I understand why you use the word lodging, I just don't think it fits. I
need to know as a consumer exactly how I can benefit from your product. If I'm
confronted with a word that I need to define, it delays my understanding of
the product and increases the chance that I not use it.

Regardless, good luck to you. I wish you the best of successes.

~~~
torrenegra
Thank you! We'll need it!

------
billydean
All that work on the backend and, sadly, the lack of time put into the landing
page will make it all for naught.

* 7 steps? Why would I want to be involved in something that complex? 3-4 steps max.

* 11 benefits? I'm not going to read or be able to process all that. 3 max, give me something I can quickly understand and tell friends about.

* That screenshot has got to go. Looks amateur at best.

~~~
mahmud
Nothing they can't tweak "over the next few weeks". They're not open yet.

~~~
calambrac
But they have a landing page explaining what they are, and they're obviously
already doing their PR push. How many eyeballs are they getting that, instead
of saying "I'll have to come back and check it out when it goes live", are
saying "Uh, what?" and won't go back?

------
swombat
Erm... Doing 27'000 hours of development in private, without any customers
beta-testing early versions of the site, seems completely insane. Why would
you ever do that? I mean, if you really don't have a choice at all, because
the project is that big, then fair enough (but in that case, don't do this as
your first start-up - do it later when you have access to funds and people).

Imho the CTO/CEO of this start-up should have figured out a way to get
something out there and test the concept for at most 1/10th of that cost. Much
smarter, and cheaper, than trying to cram developers like chickens in a coop.

~~~
breck
The interesting thing was it was done in Colombia. If you read the job ad it
pays 30,000,000 Colombian pesos, which equals ~$15,000 (or $5k/month per
developer).

Which is pretty damn cheap for a 40/hr week developer, nevermind 80.

So it's even smarter than at first appears.

edit: Colombia.

~~~
alexitosrv
Colombia, South America is quite different to Columbia

(sorry, just nitpicking a little ... :)

~~~
breck
i should _really_ know better. (my gf is Colombian) :)

------
alex_c
From the benefits on the job description page:

[http://alexander.letmego.com/2009/01/29/very-
special-90-day-...](http://alexander.letmego.com/2009/01/29/very-
special-90-day-job-opportunity/)

I see no mention of exercise, and:

* Unlimited food and beverages, including of course Red Bull and coffee.

* _If interested_ , we will offer you healthy and balanced food. _(emphasis mine)_

I have to wonder how productivity would be affected if they offered an
environment just as immersive, but a bit more focused on health. Healthy mind
in healthy body, right? I don't think I could last more than a couple of
weeks.

~~~
andreshb
I am sure home cooked food by a cook is way healthier than ramen noodles or
rice and beans, which is the diet PG suggests (and that Ive lived on for quite
a while)

UPDATE: I found a picture of their meals...
[http://letmego.com/to/141440/gallery#http://hal.bz/i//l14144...](http://letmego.com/to/141440/gallery#http://hal.bz/i//l141440/letmego_immersion_home_1246392113_lgallery.jpg)

~~~
alex_c
Mmm, that does look pretty good. The "if interested" part made me worried.

------
jlongster
Ugh, that sounds like an awful experience.

~~~
andreshb
I don't know if I could do 90 days, but I would like to have that work
environment for maybe two weeks. No distractions, and everything else taken
care of. Weekends off though.

~~~
mseebach
I've though of this as a business. Find a rural place in beautiful
surroundings, fit it with a bunch of high quality workstations, a fast
internet connection, meeting area, lounge area and small but private sleeping
quarters. Fill the fridge with good, healthy food and have someone come in and
cook dinner. Breakfast and lunch is self-serve.

I'd market it as a place for get-stuff-done-retreats for entire teams (I
thought of the name "CramCamp") rather than the semi-luxury-relaxed setting of
traditional conference resorts.

You're in the middle of nowhere, so physical distractions are few, but in
nature, so clear-your-mind/10-mins-of-privacy walks are right out the door.

~~~
andreshb
Sounds like it might be a good idea, however, you would have to prove cost
benefits.

~~~
clistctrl
There could be something there, I imagine more than a few companies would pay
very generously to trim 7 months from their timeline. Of course the cost of
all that white board paint might add up :)

I'm a nerd, I've had my share of overnight music blasting pausing for the
occasional ping-pong game pizza eating soda pounding programming sessions.
I've even gone several months working > 60 hours a week, but still thats not
near the intensity of this. My point is, it sounds like they have all their
needs met except for one... for me I have a girl friend to take care of it,
what do these guys do?

------
le_dominator
So basically, you screwed up your scheduling, your project management and your
resource allocation. As a last ditch effort to save the project you created a
sweatshop and bandied it around under the euphemism of "immersion".

Instead of taking personal responsibility for entrepreneurial, management, and
financial shortcomings, you've degraded people's health and sanity.

Going so far as to mock these people who built your product by showing before
and after pictures of them in a state of decline and then presenting that to
us as "humor" is a bit much.

I'm insulted and ashamed at the way this operation was carried out. Hacker
News is supposed to be a community of the forward thinking, not those who wish
to revert to the abuses of the industrial era.

------
jlees
Add a few staged infights and you pretty much have Hacker Big Brother meets
Shattered (reality TV show where participants didn't sleep for a week), with a
dash of Apprentice (you'd have to throw out a coder after each week), Dragons'
Den (have nice closeups of bad feature pitches) & even Startup.com.

God, Channel 4'd be all over this. I'd best pitch the idea to them quick!

~~~
andreshb
I like it a lot. When I first heard of it that was my first thought. They had
a ustream, but it was not as exciting as I thought.

------
jonknee
I don't want to be that "this would take a weekend!" guy, but 27,000 hours?
There must be some hidden complexity somewhere. Excited to try out the product
though, sounds like a great idea.

~~~
jacquesm
Impressive to put in that kind of hard work for such a long period. I'd be
falling asleep at my keyboard after the first month or so.

Also, I wonder how this would stack up against the same thing done on a
'regular' schedule. Of course nobody in their right mind is going to do an
'a/b' test on something like that but it would be interesting to see if this
kind of all-out effort really pays off or if there are hidden costs which make
it less than what it seems.

------
felideon
A little off topic but: Colombia as in the country? It seems the company is
based off the New York area but all the names/faces look Colombian. Is the dev
team located in Colombia?

Just curious since this is the first time I've heard of a "Colombian startup".

~~~
andreshb
This is Colombia as in the country. Bogota, Colombia. Alex Torrenegra is
Colombian but also lives in NY. This was developed in Colombia by Colombians
for the rest of the world.

I promise this will not be the last time you hear about a Colombian startup.
(Disclosure: I am Colombian too)

------
DannoHung
How do they capture travelers? Also, how do they convince travelers to go to a
particular place?

~~~
smithjchris
Big nets.

------
mrbgty
So were requirements, design, coding, debugging and testing all crammed into
this 90 days?

I'm guessing that system is going to be very difficult to maintain. You need
some downtime for designs to settle in your mind and to be sure that it's
going to work.

If you're going 24/7 for 90 days, I expect the design to be poor, the code to
be hacked/patched, the bug count per loc to be very high and the test coverage
to be minimal.

------
Hexstream
Ugh. Andres' transformation (photos at bottom) reminds me of "faces of meth".

------
dantheman
I really question the productivity measures used in this article. All time in
front of a monitor is not equal. Sure they tripled the amount of time they
were at their desk -- how did it impact the quality of the code, the
abstractions used, the overall design, etc.

I know that after some really long days, I look back at what I wrote and am
like WTF did I do.

------
robryan
There is no partial payment plan for those who quit or get fired before day 90
of coding is reached.

Wonder what the reason is to load the last payment and underpay on the first
2, more pressure to push to complete the project at the end?

------
edw519
"...we are pleased to note that there were no fatalities due to programmer-on-
programmer violence..."

Good thing you used a framework. Who knows what would have happened if you
didn't.

------
numbchuckskills
This is nothing to be proud of. I'm surprised they are willing to broadcast
that they: \- we're able to convince some amateur developers to work slave
camp hours \- didn't hit the goal \- on top of these two, they spent 3x what
they normally do.

I can't see
[http://about.letmego.com/letmego/content/career_opportunitie...](http://about.letmego.com/letmego/content/career_opportunities)
getting many visits.

Just my opinion of course. What would the inverse of this scenario be? A
start-up that has remote workers and saves 3x the amount of money of keeping
everyone in one spot, has flex hours, and hits the targets.

That would be something worth blogging about.

------
smithjchris
I'm not sure this is ethical or sane. In Europe we have working time
regulations and that is for a good reason.

Seems to be another attempt to justify start-up whipping tactics to cash in
quick rather than build a well-backed product with staff who won't hate you.

------
andreshb
"The Results:

We didn’t reach the beta milestone completely, but we were able to release a
limited beta version of the site. We are still developing some of LetMeGo’s
traveler-focused features.

We found that the productivity of the team was also three times higher than
usual. For those of you familiar with RescueTime, the tool we used, we measure
productivity by multiplying average efficiency per week times the tracked time
worked per week.

Productivity = Average Efficiency * Work Time

Productivity Working as Usual = 1.22 x 30.9h/week = 37.7/week

Productivity at the LetMeGo Immersion = 1.53 x 73.8h/week = 112.91/week

Ratio: 1:2.99

Given that the productivity and the cost increased side by side, we can then
conclude that the biggest benefits is that we saved seven months of
development. If it wasn’t for the Immersion, a limited beta of LetMeGo would
have not been released yet and the full site would have not been launched
until the second quarter of 2010."

~~~
swombat
What exactly is the point of quoting part of the article without adding any
comment of your own?

~~~
andreshb
My bad

