
Ask HN: Why nobody cares about good engineering rather than how to reduce costs? - svett
For the last 6 months, I have been running consulting business with not so much great success. My initial goal was to build small 5+ boutique company and that&#x27;s it. However, the expectations met the reality. Right I just have one permanent project and just lost one more because of lack of motivation to contribute to some of the worst code bases I have ever seen. However, it&#x27;s been more like a contractor than software consulting business. It does not scale.<p>I assume working 12-14h per day for 5-6 months does not work. I was doing cold emails or approaching people and everybody says NO NO NO. Event I bought a formal suit for a meeting. The person don&#x27;t event respond after the meeting. I sent a follow up email and no response. Very professional? I have more 12+ years experience working for well know companies in cloud and dev tools field. And What? It looks like that the engineer skills and knowledge are commodity for everybody.<p>Being one man show is hard. Any suggestions what I am doing wrong?
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FullMtlAlcoholc
Your whole mindset is wrong. Think of it from the perspective of people you
are cold calling. They arent engineers, all they see is the finished app or
website. They just want somwthing that works. When you buy laundry detergent,
do you care about the active ingredient or how it was produced? All you care
about is does it clean your clothes. These are small companies not looking to
scale, so good engineering doesnt lead to greater sales. It doesnt add value

Also I'm going to assume English isn't your first language. If you are to
English speakers you really need to work on your language skills

I'm also going to be brutally honest if you have 12 plus years experience and
you don't understand the nature of business then perhaps you should have
someone help you on that end because understanding why people don't need great
engineering

~~~
toexitthedonut
>These are small companies not looking to scale

And this also separates what people call "startups" from small companies. All
startups start out as small companies, but they don't comprise all small
companies. They look and follow the value that will require them to grow.

I think, indeed, that a company must value engineering if they want to grow
really big. If they don't, then engineering/tech is not made a priority.

~~~
fredophile
Even if you want to grow really big engineering isn't always a factor.
Startups shouldn't be wasting resources worrying about scaling until they have
a decent product. Early on quick iteration times are much more important. As
long as things aren't so bad that the code base prevents changes fast and
cheap are a reasonable approach for a brand new startup.

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teovall
I don't mean this to be harsh, I mean it constructively. You need to work on
your writing skills. Your three paragraph post has quite a few errors and some
clumsy wording. You may be coming off as unprofessional and this could be
hurting your prospects.

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soneca
I believe you should accept that you are doing sales and practice for that.
What you are perceiving as lack of regard for your good engineering skills
might be only your own lack of regard for acquiring sales skills.

And if you are selling at anexo English speaking market, I also agree a lot
with teovall's comment that you must improve your writing skills. I am not a
native english speaker and Grammarly helps me a lot. I highly recommend this
software for improving your writing in english.

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wayn3
if you cold call me just to tell me that my codebase is not good enough for
you to even touch, im not going to be interested.

your english isnt exactly stellar either.

if you want to make my code better, that doesnt add value. the bad code
clearly works. or else I wouldnt be in business. "good code" is irrelevant. if
that makes your heart bleed, welcome to the real world.

every tech ipo ever has bad code. twilio has bad code. dropbox has bad code,
uber has bad fucking code. maybe google doesnt. mighty google has no bad code.
you bet facebook is a load of shitcode. maybe not anymore, but for the first
decade? easily.

do you think mark "3 week mvp" zuckerberg gave a shit about code quality? the
guy was studying liberal arts.

ask any YC partner. code quality doesnt matter.

if you can get shit done, however, youre going to be the shit.

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alaskamiller
Welcome to the indie game.

The first realization is that despite you have 12+ yrs of experience it's only
functioning as a tiny cog in a larger operation whereby most of the work was
out of sight and out of mind for you.

Everything from advertising to marketing to sales to business management to
account management to billing, to project management, to development to
deployment to support now falls on your shoulder.

And guess what, engineering for most businesses are the least expensive line
item.

You probably want to match your last salary, so say you were making $150k/yr
then really you have to find $200k for 2000 billable hours. That's $100/hr.

In terms of contractor rates that's pushing towards the top end of the market
when most devs are hovering around the $25 to $60/hr range.

So really, to make that $100/hr billable rate you will have chase a lot to
deliver that kind of value.

Most small-medium sized business aren't interested in nursing an
engineer/developer/consultant for $16k/mo. They'll only be interested in maybe
a half-day or day rate.

Even then the only value add you can bring to the table is to reduce costs for
them. No one cares about how much effort or work you put in. You're not an
employee to them. You are the consultant. They're purchasing an end product.

You either get real quick at being efficient or you're gonna wash out.

Large sized business would rather hire unless you possess some specialization
they lack or is under market. So you have to punch above your weight class.
Are your skills really worth $200/hr? If so, then you have the means to get
those jobs by offering $100/hr. But, then again, if you were able to get that
type of pay you would have just gotten a job.

To be independent, cashflow management is now the most important thing.
Followed by your sales management. To then lastly your engineering skills.

All in all, it's likely your first 1 to 2 year you'll be making far under
market until you've established a roster of clients.

The inevitability is that you'll have to turn to an agency model and hire
others to scale. Which presents another series of problems to your plate. At
that point you might as well just be another business manager hiring out
technologists contractors who are trying to convince you that they're worth
$100/hr that you then have to flip and sell for more than that.

Good luck.

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AznHisoka
Have you ever thought that thse companies need you because their code bases
are absolute messes?

If their code were 100% intuitive and elegant they probably wouldn't need you.

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taway_1212
From my POV, the problem with consulting is that large companies either
recognize how important software is for their success and develop it in-house
or are foolish enough to outsource it to large consulting players (IBM,
Accenture, some Indian firms). They mostly have no interest in a tiny
consulting shop, which is a shame for you, because they have tons of money to
spend. Unfortunately, this leaves you mostly serving all remaining parts of
economy (mid and small companies, software startups etc.), which is far less
juicy. Interestingly, in my country (Poland) some large corps (a large telecom
for example) are open to throwing a smaller and less important projects
towards a newcomer - but for an unattractive, fixed price (they want to see if
you can deliver on the same level as the big players, but for much less). So
again, you're being squeezed.

Of course, all of this is true assuming you're doing commodity software
development. I imagine it's very different if you have an expert niche
knowledge that is in demand (like security perhaps?).

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rdiddly
Good engineering does reduce costs. Or it increases revenue. Those are the
only two things that make engineering "good" in the eyes of those who pay for
engineering services.

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jetti
> Right I just have one permanent project and just lost one more because of
> lack of motivation to contribute to some of the worst code bases I have ever
> seen.

That is going to be a big problem. There are a lot of shitty code bases and as
a consultant you are going to have to clean up the mess. If you don't think
you can stay motivated perhaps you should try and pivot to another idea,
perhaps taking into account your experience you could create dev tools to
sell.

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lovelearning
I guess it's because we the engineering community have done a bad job of
explaining to outsiders how good engineering can reduce costs.

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odonnellryan
> because of lack of motivation to contribute to some of the worst code bases
> I have ever seen.

Your job as a consultant, if you're working on existing projects, is to fix
this. This is where you'll be making your money. By fixing their crap
codebase.

You wouldn't have much work without products like this.

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raarts
Unless lives or money is at stake nobody cares about code quality.

