

The huge gap between geeks and business types - Consultuing
http://consultuning.blogspot.com/2010/06/huge-gap-between-geeks-and-business.html

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mkramlich
It can take 5 minutes to explain a recommended solution to some technical
problem.

But it can take anywhere from 5 hours to 5 weeks or even 5+ years (depending
on the thing in question) to reach the point where you would know _which_
solution to recommend and with confidence.

That differential is what should, in part, drive higher pay rates. In addition
to the impact of the scarcity of raw talent, independent of education and
experience levels.

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megablast
The problem is when you get people who don't understand the issue, hiring
people who do. And setting the price.

Also, the problem with these jobs boards is that you are competing with people
in poorer countries, where wages are not as high in developing countries.
There is no way you can do the same work at their price.

On top of all this, the hirer might be starting out at an incredibly low
price, since it is not a huge priority, then increasing the price, although
even for a low price this seems very low.

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jrockway
The job post referred to x.264, an open source video encoding/decoding
library, while the commentary was directed at H.264, a proprietary video
codec.

Yes, they are obviously related, but if you already know x.264, as the post
asks, then it shouldn't be amazingly difficult to do. As in, the offer should
have two more zeros on it, instead of four.

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ghurlman
This would have been better positioned as a post regarding the gap between the
experience hiring mangers want, and the money they're willing to pay.

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tomkarlo
As someone who's on the business and technical side, I'm not sure this post
shows much about the gap, except that some people are either cheapskates or
ignorant. You can find folks who fit that description in just about any
sufficiently large population.

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CapitalistCartr
The plural of anecdote is NOT statistic. One example of someone using a job
bidding site to show their ignorance isn't indicative of anything. On the
other hand, many non-programmers writing specs make the mistake of not
asking/checking their assumptions. That mistake is not limited to any subset
of humans, in my experience.

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dkarl
There are multiple gulfs of ignorance between geeks and business types, and
they don't all go one way. Some of my coworkers and I spent ten minutes trying
to decide how to answer a question in an RFI before it dawned on me (thanks to
reading an article on HN) that the question was asking whether we would be
willing to put source code in escrow. Until that realization, we thought they
were asking how geographically distributed the backups of our CVS server were.

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dkarl
I think they're counting on someone looking in the code and the spec to
satisfy their curiosity about what the job posting is about and then realizing
that, 1) now that they've seen the bug they want to fix it, and 2) they've
just spent all day working for free, so they might as well fix the bug and
pick up $120.

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Maven911
I think he is pointing to an interesting phenomemon, which is the over-
specialization of what we do:

Example:

CS degree --> compression/codec -> video or picture or sound (to me they are
different worlds) -> H.264 -> specific standards of H.264 (no one knows
everything)

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aresant
The sweet revenge in this all is that the job poster will likely spend $120
ten times over churning through under-qualified programmers who think they can
get the job done based on his description :)

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rbanffy
It should not be horribly difficult to build minimally conversational AI's,
arm them with names and e-mail addresses and let them address the problem by
themselves.

It will be educational for the guy who wanted to pay $120 ;-)

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Locke1689
Well DarkShikari, are you up to the task? ;)

