Here is proof they aren't mentally all there, thus clearly their idea is probably also half baked:
"I mean there isn't that much to it, it's just a website with a database, I was hoping you could just throw it together as a favor."
OP gave an hourly rate.. if their friend really thinks there's nothing to it, it shouldnt be too hard to pay for 3 hours of time and be on your way to business success.
So either they don't even have enough money to pay for 3 hours of work, OR they think it's 30 hours of work and they expect you to just do that for free (wtf). We don't even need to go into the fact that really they're asking for 300 hours minimum realistically.
The thing is, one of the stages of the sales process is qualification. That's where you assess whether the prospective customer is an appropriate fit to actually become a customer. Among other things that includes finding out whether they have lots of money which they want to spend now.
The OP did a beautiful job of qualification here, he sent one message, and then the prospect revealed that they weren't in the market for spending money on a programmer, and walked away. PERFECTION. This is a moment of joy for anyone in sales because they no longer have to waste a single minute with that useless contact, and they can move on.
He should be happy! It's only programmers, artists etc. who seem to get cranky about the sales process and pen long cranky articles about how their craft doesn't get enough respect or whatever. There is clearly a huge market for programming, so there's no need for ruminating, just kick back with a beer, celebrate your newfound freetime, then get back to coding cool stuff.
I'm basically a sales veteran, and what you write is totally true. However, it's ignoring that this conversation didn't start as a sales call. These were acquaintances, and the business guy thought he was asking a favor of a 'friend' (however foolishly).
If a friend asked me why his car is making a funny noise, I don't quite him my rates.. even though Im also very skilled as a mechanic. If he asked me if I could help him in person change his timing belt, I'd consider. If he asked me to change it at my house while he was off doing other stuff, well.. he better be a good friend and the other stuff better helping his family member deal with cancer.
The real question is, was the asker under the impression this is really a 2-3 hour favor, or were they really expecting a weeks worth of help for free? (I've never helped anyone with a task that took 40 hours in my life, and I'm a super helpful person)
Okay, I will throw it together. Since I'm unpaid, and have no share in the business venture, I will be the sole copyright holder. To test the business idea, I will allow it to be run over 60 day free trial. Then we can talk about what happens next.
“idea for a business”—which doesn’t pay its workers or value the necessary contributions to get it off the ground by having a respectful, thoughtful discussion? Mental, for sure.
Why should the author think about it further than that? It’s not like you can educate them to understand ‘business’.
In business, I have four "bad words": just, only, simply, and obviously.
Used in a work context, they are nearly always used in an attempt to diminish the perceived effort of something, so I get very sketched out when anyone (even/especially other programmers) starts throwing them around.
Hmm when I think about it, the only two in that list I’ve used are just and only. Whenever I see myself writing them in my response, I spend the 5-10 min to throw together the PR to do it. It’ll lack testing but I deploy it to a QA server and let the asker go wild with seeing if the solution matches. If I can’t do that, I realize there’s something else there and rewrite my response. I find that to be a useful gauge on the appropriateness of those words.
> Used in a work context, they are nearly always used in an attempt to diminish the perceived effort of something
Similarly, when I hear people say "nearly always" to justify a position I get very sketched out and think they're either not listening or are inexperienced and irrationally afraid of what I'm trying to tell them.
Few years ago a neighbor in my apartment building found out I knew about computers, and he wanted me to "just build his app for him". Being polite, I tried explaining to him that I really don't know anything about app development, I just move and shift data around on servers and draw pictures on whiteboards, but I think he thought I was just being humble. Eventually after some relenting, I told him to email me with the details, and gave him my email address.
He emailed me the next day, and "all" he wanted was a website that allowed users to upload arbitrary videos of any length, and recommend fun videos that could be shared, and have a comment system.
I replied back explaining to him that that's a lot more than "just an app", requiring a fair bit of server infrastructure and storage to keep all the videos, even if my labor were free. He replied asking how much it would cost to run. He thought it was on the order of like $12 a month. I explained that closer to like $1000 a month to get started, like $200,000/month if it gets popular, not counting the ~$25,000 it would take to get a really crappy prototype built.
I've tried helping these sorts of people (when i was younger).
"it's super simple to throw together" turns into "no no you're doing it all wrong. what i'm looking for is a way to make like, microsoft word, you know how it automatically formats for you? yeah i want that on the blog comment field, and then you press the print button and it prints out the office printer"
there's a never-ending list of fairly impossible requirements; "can't you just make it work like my computer at home" for people who have no real experience in software OR business.
"We just need some software that does X", this is as reasonable as saying "we just need a building where we can do X".
People get this idea because they see companies create programs over and over. The same applies to buildings, building are created reliably over and over and over. If all that stands between you and success is a building, or some software, you're in a good place.
The difference is people have respect for the value of a building, they understand the cost, they understand the reason for those costs. People don't have the same understanding for software.
Nobody would say "I thought you could just throw a 4,000 square foot house together for me, it's nothing special, just a common house", but apparently some people will say "I thought you could just throw a website with a database together for me, it's nothing special".
Respect is at the heart of the issue. Disrespect for programmers seems to be endemic and it results in people suffering needless indignities. Even their choice of words is offensive:
> throw a website with a database together
People who say stuff like that think we're monkeys who slap shit together until it works.
I don't know why software developers don't have practices with partners like lawyers, doctors and other professionals do. Seems like it would go a long way towards imposing some much deserved respect.
Lawyers, doctors and other professionals also have barriers to entry and can lose their license if they violate the rules of their trade. As long as any Tom, Dick and Harriette can call themselves a Software Engineer, it will be that much harder to get that respect.
One difference between lawyers/doctors and software "engineers" is that often it's okay to just hack something together in software. It's still work to hack something together though, so if I'm hacking something together for someone else they'll have to pay for my work.
I had a job working on an ecommerce site for a company that sold wine direct to consumers. On my first day, a coworker asked me, “What will you do when the website is finished?”
It was interesting to reflect on the misconceptions inherent in her question. The website is never finished. She didn’t understand that maintenance and upgrades are ongoing, and this is the nature of software.
That said, I do wonder if AI will make OP’s friend’s request seem reasonable. “Hey, ChatGPT, I just need an ecommerce site for a winery that sells to consumers. Can you walk me through how to build that?”
"Hey ChatGPT, there's a bug with the payment processing. I think their API has a breaking change. Can you fix it ASAP?"
"I'm sorry my knowledge horizon is the end of last year. Your site will have to remain broken until I'm updated."
It would be a miracle if a business owner was smart enough to ask this question, it would be unacceptable to not fix it immediately, and it would be impossible avoid this.
To the wrong kind of person you're identifying a sucker, not a big bad bully. I don't condone it, but I have definitely seen it. It's just as ignorant to not identify someone as naive at business as naive are the programmers who take on these kinds of projects.
The adult way to handle this is to say no and explain why they're crazy. Desperate people find each other regardless. Not dissimilar from other aspects of life.
> People don't have the same understanding for software.
To be fair, with houses, once you've actually built a 4,000 square foot house, you can just copy-paste it onto another person's plot of land, and maybe tweak it a bit as long as they aren't too picky about the layout and the geology is mostly the same. Also, if you're lucky you might be able to find a pre-built house on the internet and copy and tweak that, so you might get away with never learning how to build one from scratch in the first place.
Whereas with software, ... oh wait no, that was how software works, it's buildings that have to be re-built from scratch every single time, so people tend to actually understand what kind of endeavor they're asking for if they need one.
I meant people understand and respect that you have to pay for labor to build a house or a shed, but don't always understand that about software.
And if someone wants some software that is just a copy paste, I'm actually happy to help with that for free (use Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V, you're welcome), but if they want more than copy paste, yes, I would like payment for my work, just like if I was building a building.
To be fair, you can just buy an RV or camper trailer and plop it onto a piece of land. If you're ambitious you can get a trailer home plopped down. That we don't take more advantage of economies of scale for building is a travesty.
I think if I got that email I would advise them to use ChatGPT. If it really is just throwing "a website with a database" together then I think ChatGPT would be sufficient to guide them through setting up a basic WordPress install and some plugins.
A famous writer told this same story. People would come up to them and say "I have your next book. It'll so be easy, I've got the outline, you just have to write it." They really believe "just write it" is a small detail.
The "do it for exposure (because I don't value your skills enough to pay you what they are worth)" is rampant in the commercial arts. Photographers and other artists get it all the time.
The thing is, software pretty much is the business in many cases, or at least an essential component of it. Facebook is an advertising business, but without the websites and aps, there'd be no-one to advertise to and nowhere to do it.
The idea guy in this scenario doesn't even understand the basic idea that you have to provide "consideration" for the assignment of rights/copyright. If he does find a person to build his software as a favor, he's got potential issues like an unjust enrichment claim or worse if he does find a way to monetize it.
If I somehow suffer the misfortune of interacting with someone like this I often stop the conversation and tell them to visit Fiverr. A half-baked idea coming from unseasoned people is not even going to make for a good consulting client. I tell them to hire a graphic artist to mock it up before they start with a programmer.
What I will sometimes do in this situation is a free look at the requirements, throw some rough time estimates against it. Maybe even offer to try and manage it for them a bit via some cheaper Upwork developers if they don't like my rates. Of course emphasising that you generally get what you pay for in terms of quality.
That's the favour. Generally though I totally agree, i got over working for free after starting a (basically) clone of Uber for a friend who 'just needed something throwing together' when I was 19!
We all have simplistic models of things we don't understand. It's important to train yourself to push back from that default perspective in domains you're not familiar with.
I still get the occasional aspiring entrepreneur reaching out to me on LinkedIn asking me to build an app for them in exchange for free, or very nearly zero equity with no cash payment (like 0.05% of the product).
I usually don't respond, but occasionally I tell them that what they're doing is unethical at best. If they have an actual business plan then they can pay the person doing the lion's share of the work or at least offer a sizeable equity package.
I was about to write, I have seen this on occasion since I started my career (it's probably older, but that's when i became cognizant of it). I've had my first job as a programmer in 2001.
Implicit in the conversation is the notion that you're beneath them. They're the important guys dealing with all the important money making stuff. You're just a lowly programmer who should be glad to even be remembered. Look how generous they were, they gave you the privilege to work for free on their important enterprise. Aren't you thankful?
If managers in a company that actually pays developers can make that mistake, it's no surprise that people with less experience have even more false assumptions.
And, of course, expecting anyone to work for free gives me the suspicion that these guys haven't grown up yet.
My favorite response is to tell them I'll look at it after they have sketched what every single screen looks like, with every single button accounted for and reasoned about. They agree to it, and I have yet to see a finished proposal.
Hell, back in 1997, I wrote a list of 10 ideas I thought would make good online businesses when the technology was right.
Of those, from what I remember, I predicted Amazon, Youtube/Netflix, Facebook, Discord, Twitch, Paypal, and Reddit.
I had no part in any of them because I didn't have the knowhow, the money, the connections, or the time.
I've been approached since then when people have "ideas." I explain to them that ideas are worthless and that if they want me to work with them, I want an 80% stake that we will renegotiate in time as they prove they can sell the product. This normally shuts them up in short order.
I've gotten in arguments with so many people over this. Everyone has "ideas". Everyone has "good ideas". Most people occasionally have a "great idea". Ideas are free and require very little effort.
Ideas really aren't worth anything. Ideas aren't what run the world, implementations of those ideas do. I suspect that if I went to a venture capitalist with just an idea like "Uber but for X", they would laugh me out of the building (or more likely ask how the hell I got in there in the first place).
I've told this story before on HN, but I remember back in 2013, I needed a job, and responded to a posting on Craigslist for a software engineer. I met up with a nice lady who had an idea for a specific kind of travel website. She wanted me to make the entire website myself, and she was generously offering me 3% equity for doing it.
I had no idea how to negotiate this, and I was slightly less confrontational at the time, so I politely declined, in no small part because I didn't want to work with someone that thought that an idea was worth 97% of a company while doing, as far as I could tell, between 0-5% of the actual work.
Saying "hey, you're a developer, build this site for me" is the same as saying "hey, you're an architect and a supply chain expert and a manufacturing guru and an accountant, build this manufacturing plant and distribution center for me." Just because there aren't any bricks or steel doesn't mean there isn't any labor or expertise.
Exactly; it takes a long time to build an application, and even longer if you want it to not completely suck. I don't feel I was any "good" at programming until I had been a software engineer for like 6-7 years. I really don't think I'm that great now, but at least I've gotten a lot better at knowing the rough effort required to do things.
Obviously I'm not going to claim that what I do is as exhausting as digging ditches or laying concrete (fundamentally I do get to sit on my ass all day and stare at a big screen), but it's not zero effort.
Sure if your idea is 'uber for X' then it's worthless.
And of course, any idea that stays just an idea is also worthless.
But in the right hands ideas themselves can be valuable. Would you rather have your crack new team work on 'uber for doughnuts', or some genuinely innovative and market-making idea? So then, which is more valuable, the innovative idea or the crack team? The answer is both, together.
We're talking about people who have an idea, ask for it to be implemented, and assume that the labor involved has no value. The idea is worthless because it is only in the implementation and execution processes that it gets fully fleshed out to become a reality. It's still absolutely worthless on its own, and is akin to going to a logging company with a bunch of pinecones and demanding to be paid a tree's price for each seed.
Reading that makes me think you’re probably at least 10-15 , because when I started out working as a web developer in the early 2000s (when there was no word for unicorns, full -stack developers etc) this felt like happening on a daily basis ^^ Also you are much smarter then me back then - as you had quite a good response ready (I usually just sight finished my beer and looked for the nearest exit)… maybe that’s a side effect of people usually having learned that software development is expensive by now ^^ But some might be a bit slower then others ^^
I've been struggling with this for a long time. Maybe it's also because when I talk about and try to encourage the conversation, I oversimplify the programming part. I always try to encourage others not to think of it as sorcery, even though sometimes it is. But all of this is just to give non-experts the idea that it's simple to understand broadly. Of course, I spare them the time and technical details that require deep knowledge, just to keep them afloat.
Reminds me of that saying "be careful what you wish for". As others have pointed out in this thread, it’s ok to have ideas but it’s the implementations that ruin the world.
I think people always want the programmers to work for free to fund their business deals and ideas that aren't very well though out with little understanding of what's involved.
I think people also feel this way about most professions that the doctor can just look at your issue or the lawyer just implicitly known the answer to complicated legal questions and they have "quick questions" that they don't want to pay you a dime for.
The proper reply to "I have an Idea for a business" is "we all have bills to pay, and we can't extend credit to any commercial project..."
You may think this sounds unreasonable or crass, but one will end up getting conned eventually if you accept sweat equity deals for commercial projects.
Also, if someone is deprecating something you value... like your area of specialization... the premise of a "good" friendship should be reconsidered.
I've experienced this from friends too. Once you say no, their understanding improves as they pick up the work themselves and then they realise that actually, no, it isn't easy or quick.
Their ideas drop pretty quick after that.
I don't doubt people like the author's acquaintance exist, but I think that putting them up as "the norm" is really just setting up a straw man, and so many of the "assumptions" in this article feel like straw men. To be clear, I don't doubt some people hold those assumptions, but given all the obvious evidence to the contrary, those people can be safely ignored as having no idea what they're talking about.
For example, the largest, most profitable companies in the US are all tech companies, where software is either the primary product or an integral part of the product: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, and Tesla. So if you're someone who thinks "software engineers are interchangeable cogs" or "in a business, software is just the icing on the cake", then sorry, you're an idiot, because you're oblivious to the fact that the top companies won largely by having the best software. And these companies also legendarily pay mightily for the best talent - why would they do that if "writing software is easy" or "software engineers are interchangeable cogs"?
It just irks me when people take idiotic statements and then hold them up as "assumptions" in need of myth-busting. It's like when journalists find a couple outlandish Twitter comments by a few rando mouth-breathers so they can put together an article with a "Look what people are saying online!!!" headline.
I mean I would not provide labor for free and I will likely not provide labor at all for family and friends, it's too complicated, but still for friends I'd at least listen to the elevator pitch and steer them toward a reasonable outcome (which may include "you cannot do that without capital, set up a landing page on the cheap and raise some funding" or "wordpress now can be an entire e-commerce you don't even need a programmer" ) before firing off the consulting rates.
That's incredibly frustrating. I'm not a programmer or computer anything (except a perpetual Linux journeyman) but my dad was a craftsman who could make wood sing, and no one appreciated what it took.
I am forever thinking of drawings I would do to enhance (for myself) some idea or note I'm developing but I can't draw, but I would never ask someone who could to do it for me as a favor.
I had a once-in-a-lifetime dog who died, and I have an idea for a triptych of 3 scenes on him I am saving up to pay someone to paint. I would never, ever say I just need an artist.
Ideas are easy. Craft is demanding. Mastery is damn hard.
"I mean there isn't that much to it, it's just a website with a database, I was hoping you could just throw it together as a favor."
OP gave an hourly rate.. if their friend really thinks there's nothing to it, it shouldnt be too hard to pay for 3 hours of time and be on your way to business success.
So either they don't even have enough money to pay for 3 hours of work, OR they think it's 30 hours of work and they expect you to just do that for free (wtf). We don't even need to go into the fact that really they're asking for 300 hours minimum realistically.