Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?
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I'm really drawing a blank here. All I could think of was taking out a newspaper ad. Or setting up a website, though I know from retail experience that driving traffic to some random website is hard even with an established product. Would it work if I bought some Google Adwords or something though?
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@Zenith a former colleague had good things to say about adwords, and bad things to say about facebook.
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@Zenith the main question, of course, is who are you going to sell your services to and what they read. If you sell to rich old farts who always read their morning papers, a newspaper ad is not such a bad idea.
In the end, you rarely end up landing a good contract with a random joe on the internets. Any custom app development is a tad more intimate than selling a ready made app on some app store.
Also if I were you, I’d sell to companies and not individuals. Individuals should buy their apps in app stores. A company can fuck you over, sure, but it’s also not entitled to most protections consumers (individuals) have in many countries.
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Well I thought about it another second and I think it would also help to have some ideas so something with non-job want ads would probably help too. I tried to do Rent-a-Coder many years ago and it seemed like there was nothing between "do my CS101 homework for $1" and "copy the entirety of Facebook for $5." I mean I think at this point I probably would entertain doing somebody's CS101 homework but I know the Facebook customer will never be satisfied.
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@Zenith you can try your luck on upwork where there had been some of the better jobs, but you’re going to compete with companies who sometimes pose as individuals, veterans who got thousands of five star feedbacks, and last I checked, even if you find a sane job description and write in, good luck if you ever get a response.
Also, sites like upwork sometimes urge working for exposure if you’re new, which must be an absolute no-no.
If you want to do work for exposure, you’re better off doing a real project for an imaginary client than finding a real one. An imaginary client at least won’t grate on your nerves.
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@Zenith Absolutely no where. It's a meaningless commodity.
What isn't a commodity is you.
What can you do? Why are you a better choice than the army of Kerbleckistanian coders I can hire for a dollar? Why are you a better choice than Avanade or IBM? And so on.
Once you can answer those questions, then the question you should ask is, where can I advertise myself. Though, you may already have some good ideas by them.
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@apapadimoulis If that question were being asked, I wouldn't be looking for alternatives to an 8-5. I'm trying really hard not to spout off a "take my ball and go home" answer but I'm really ready to take my ball and go home.
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@Zenith no one is going to ask you those questions, but you do need to be able to answer them so that you can develop "messaging" and "talking points" about your offerings (which, is really, you), and why your offerings are better options for some buyers than alternatives. Maybe that's your location, maybe it's your experience, maybe it's your expertise, maybe it's your flexibility, etc.
You really can't hide the fact that it's just you (don't bother, buyers will see through it), so incorporate that in your answer as to why it's a strength. You can always hire someone, then you play to your small team strength. And so on.
I don't have any other context from other threads, I just saw this one and thought it was interesting.
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@apapadimoulis Let me rephrase this. I want to look into custom work on a small scale because an individual or very small company might be more vested in a successful solution that I know I can deliver. I feel like when I interview for a garden variety job I'm dealing with people that aren't spending their own money or held accountable for poor decisions. Thus, the question in their mind is never "who is the best choice" but "who will work for less pay" (not the same question as "who costs less") or "who helps me virtue signal" (where my options are very limited). So I feel that I'm completely wasting my time answering the wrong question with them. I'm talking about how I can come up with creative solutions to problems and take a real interest in their mission while they're looking for a dollar number and a demographic.
It's the same as at work. They pay lip service to problems but don't entertain solutions. I'm told to stay in my lane. I don't understand why they're like that. So my tendency is to drift passive aggressive as in shut down and let them keep failing. That's not who I am and that's why I'm trying to find something else to do with my time. It's probably also why I'll end up having to pack up and move to another part of the country.
Guess I'll just have to keep up with my own projects for a while longer. I don't think they'd be marketable because, again, it's a different question. I can't provide an Indian call center to "support" them. That I don't need to is moot.
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Jesus Christ, fuck Upwork. I have to fill out an application that may not be accepted. Great, I get to hear how I'm not qualified to do development there either.
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@Zenith in this regard, people and organizations are generally the same everywhere, and I understand your frustrations.
They pay lip service to problems but don't entertain solutions. I'm told to stay in my lane. I don't understand why they're like that
The folks in an organization who would hire you (i.e. the solo engineer) really don't want, need, nor care about your input on how to solve their business problems all that differently. Sure, some advice on variable naming or code structure, fine, whatever, but I suspect you are thinking bigger than that.
By the time they've hired you, the business decisions were already made. You may have better ideas, but because you lack the bigger picture and organizational history, your ideas are probably wrong. It's simply not worth the time or energy to listen or entertain your ideas, because as I said, the decision was already made.
I want to look into custom work on a small scale because an individual or very small company might be more vested in a successful solution that I know I can deliver.
You are totally right about that; lots of small businesses need "a guy" who can do this. They (more precisely, the owners) will gladly take the risk of hiring "a guy" rather than paying an agency with a track record. There's a tremendous amount of opportunity out there, and tons of incompetent and overpriced "guys".
But here's the thing -- 80% of the work will not be coding; it's sales, meetings, presentations, etc. And then, likely, 95% of the work you find is going to be Wordpress or Hubspot customizations.
There's nothing wrong with that, but just remember, businesses want to work with businesses, and the more business-like you become, the more opportunities you'll find.
Freelancing/contracting might be an option, just shorter 3-6 month gigs here and there!
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@Zenith The only place I can imagine advertising to the right crowd is StackOverflow or some similar coding advice site.
At least SO has their own ad service, so you're not stuck with Google's algorithm.Other than that, consider snail-mailing to small businesses that seem to have a crappy custom app already? Maybe point out some areas that you could definitely improve?
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@apapadimoulis said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
The folks in an organization who would hire you (i.e. the solo engineer) really don't want, need, nor care about your input on how to solve their business problems all that differently. Sure, some advice on variable naming or code structure, fine, whatever, but I suspect you are thinking bigger than that.
By the time they've hired you, the business decisions were already made. You may have better ideas, but because you lack the bigger picture and organizational history, your ideas are probably wrong. It's simply not worth the time or energy to listen or entertain your ideas, because as I said, the decision was already made.So then I don't understand the case I can make to hire me over some mook from Durkadurkastan. If all I'm supposed to do is exactly what I'm told exactly how I'm told exactly when I'm told, the limiting factor is the employer. If what to do, how to do it better, and getting it done faster are all off the table....no wonder I'm being asked crap like Avengers vs Justice League. So I just need to stop applying/interviewing/pitching where the management likes Marvel!
It's funny we're having this conversation because I'm on a conference call right now where my boss is suddenly peddling a primitive version of the intranet site a colleague and I were trying to pitch almost two years ago at this point. We couldn't get any traction because Managed SharePoint was so ridiculously limited and no other options were entertained because we were supposed to stay in our lane and play technically helpless like good little MIS drones. That initiative, like everything else, was all Very Important
for management except we had zero support on actually making something happen until the Right Person could get around to crapping whatever out.No offense but you're really reducing software development to about the level of stocking shelves at a store.
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@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
Managed SharePoint was so ridiculously limited
It always seems to be. From the perspective of an information creator and organiser, it's pretty much a disaster from beginning to end to use SharePoint unless there's a very good support team running it. It's not at the individual page content level that the problem is. The issues with it tend to be that the metadata systems it has for making it possible to find anything that's in there are typically massively locked down (because IIS has rather short URL length limits and database entries are ever so worryingly expensive!!!
) that virtually any information that the organisation puts into SharePoint becomes immediately impossible to find. You rapidly end up with what looks like a huge pile of flat files with no real way of finding anything unless you can guess what the original filename was. The result? It's where information goes to die in isolation wards, unloved and uncared for. An actually talented support team will know this is a risk and work hard to avoid the worst outcomes. They might also have actual curators of the content. This almost never happens so it might as well be mythical. The people we had trying to push it at where I was at the time instead took the approach of disabling hierarchy and requiring everyone to use the same set of tags that they'd set up for all their instances, which were all terms that had no relevance at all for the institute I was in. Nice one guys! Good way to get shown the door and told not to let it hit you on the ass on the way out.The alternatives still have many problems, for sure, but hierarchic organisation and actually useful metadata tags help a lot. If you have actually effective users (successful research scientists tend to be that way) then they can make good progress with even fairly basic tooling.
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@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
No offense but you're really reducing software development to about the level of stocking shelves at a store.
Actually, below that of some stores. I don't know what I'd do without my job at the store. The difference in reactions is like night and day. I can stock at twice the speed and a fraction of the error rate of most people and they
appreciate it (actually timed it for the first time in a few years this week...they keep telling me I'm fast but I couldn't see it until I saw the charts). On a slow day (truck was small or late), I can catch up on backstock or help another department without being backhanded. Hell, if I see a spill, getting a dustpan or a mop doesn't result in a "stay in your lane" lecture. If I walk out with a case of spaghetti sauce and it doesn't fit because somebody put tampons in its spot on the shelf, I don't have to go through three committees of diversity and inclusion to move the tampons where they're supposed to go and stock the spaghetti sauce where it belongs. If a customer asks me where something is or if we have more in the back, the expectation is that actually I'll help them right now and not put them through ServiceHow with a wait time measured in weeks. Coworkers even ask me questions and don't get bent out of shape that I can provide an answer or suggestion. It's everything I want in a development job but can't have for some reason. When my bills are down to the point I can pay them just working at a store, there's a chance I'll do just that.
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If you join somewhere as a permanent employee, if the place has a good workplace culture then they should welcome feedback about business processes and the overall way projects are run - though don't expect everything you suggest to be done, there are other interests at play too and they are not always stupid.
I wouldn't expect a freelance coder to be taken very seriously about big picture stuff, though. If you want to freelance but have input on that kind of thing then you need to be a management consultant, not a technical one. Developers are hired to develop something, and what that thing is and the process by which the business decides that is not your responsibility. If you don't like that then you are probably not suited to freelance development.
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@bobjanova said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
If you join somewhere as a permanent employee, if the place has a good workplace culture then they should welcome feedback about business processes and the overall way projects are run - though don't expect everything you suggest to be done, there are other interests at play too and they are not always stupid.
I wouldn't expect a freelance coder to be taken very seriously about big picture stuff, though. If you want to freelance but have input on that kind of thing then you need to be a management consultant, not a technical one. Developers are hired to develop something, and what that thing is and the process by which the business decides that is not your responsibility. If you don't like that then you are probably not suited to freelance development.
Or don't sell yourself as a butt-in-seat "staff aug" guy. Sell yourself as an end to end solution guy. There are plenty of consulting shops that focus solely or nearly solely on the latter. Not sure how well that can pan out for a standalone consultant.
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@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
No offense but you're really reducing software development to about the level of stocking shelves at a store.
Actually, below that of some stores. I don't know what I'd do without my job at the store. The difference in reactions is like night and day. I can stock at twice the speed and a fraction of the error rate of most people and they
appreciate it (actually timed it for the first time in a few years this week...they keep telling me I'm fast but I couldn't see it until I saw the charts). On a slow day (truck was small or late), I can catch up on backstock or help another department without being backhanded. Hell, if I see a spill, getting a dustpan or a mop doesn't result in a "stay in your lane" lecture. If I walk out with a case of spaghetti sauce and it doesn't fit because somebody put tampons in its spot on the shelf, I don't have to go through three committees of diversity and inclusion to move the tampons where they're supposed to go and stock the spaghetti sauce where it belongs. If a customer asks me where something is or if we have more in the back, the expectation is that actually I'll help them right now and not put them through ServiceHow with a wait time measured in weeks. Coworkers even ask me questions and don't get bent out of shape that I can provide an answer or suggestion. It's everything I want in a development job but can't have for some reason. When my bills are down to the point I can pay them just working at a store, there's a chance I'll do just that.How many jobs/gigs do you have?
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@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
So then I don't understand the case I can make to hire me over some mook from Durkadurkastan.
Well, I would imagine that being a native English speaker and U.S. Citizen puts you way ahead of the crowd, for one.
If all I'm supposed to do is exactly what I'm told exactly how I'd told exactly when I'm told, the limiting factor is the employer. If what to do, how to do it better, and getting it done faster are all off the table....no wonder I'm being asked crap like Avengers vs Justice League. So I just need to stop applying/interviewing/pitching where the management likes Marvel!
Yes, organizational fit is incredibly important. In some shops, you will have a great deal of creative freedom. In others, you'll be paid six figures to be a good little soldier who only works on "approved" tasks in a manner aligned with the architecture of the application.
It's funny we're having this conversation because I'm on a conference call right now where my boss is suddenly peddling a primitive version of the intranet site a colleague and I were trying to pitch almost two years ago at this point. We couldn't get any traction because Managed SharePoint was so ridiculously limited and no other options were entertained because we were supposed to stay in our lane and play technically helpless like good little MIS drones. That initiative, like everything else, was all Very Important
for management except we had zero support on actually making something happen until the Right Person could get around to crapping whatever out.Phil Factor and others have commented on this phenomenon:
The whole IT management structure of the company seemed to focus on stopping the initiative, and the moment it looked like succeeding, announced that it was their doing or idea in the first place.
No offense but you're really reducing software development to about the level of stocking shelves at a store.
That's the level that some shops would like it to be. A developer is a developer is a developer. Fire an expensive one and hire a new one at three quarters the price. To some extent, a change like that wouldn't be entirely bad if it put a damper on the ambitions of all the 25-year-olds who feel entitled to a $170k salary simply because they've been copy-pasting code from StackOverflow for a year or two.
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@mikehurley
One full-time where I don't get to do anything because it's a non-IT IT shop that's furthermore a stepchild with a bad stepfather.
One part-time at the store.
One seasonal selling action figures at conventions.
One intermittent writing infrastructure software that currently supports the (action figure sales) business but not much else.I started up a remote consulting service last year but I basically lost that. Corona put more pressure than I could handle. I was probably going to lose my first client eventually anyway (they were not cooperative so I couldn't help them like they expected) but the lockdown severely reduced the chances of a finding others.
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@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
No offense but you're really reducing software development to about the level of stocking shelves at a store.
Actually, below that of some stores. I don't know what I'd do without my job at the store. The difference in reactions is like night and day. I can stock at twice the speed and a fraction of the error rate of most people and they
appreciate it (actually timed it for the first time in a few years this week...they keep telling me I'm fast but I couldn't see it until I saw the charts). On a slow day (truck was small or late), I can catch up on backstock or help another department without being backhanded. Hell, if I see a spill, getting a dustpan or a mop doesn't result in a "stay in your lane" lecture. If I walk out with a case of spaghetti sauce and it doesn't fit because somebody put tampons in its spot on the shelf, I don't have to go through three committees of diversity and inclusion to move the tampons where they're supposed to go and stock the spaghetti sauce where it belongs. If a customer asks me where something is or if we have more in the back, the expectation is that actually I'll help them right now and not put them through ServiceHow with a wait time measured in weeks. Coworkers even ask me questions and don't get bent out of shape that I can provide an answer or suggestion. It's everything I want in a development job but can't have for some reason. When my bills are down to the point I can pay them just working at a store, there's a chance I'll do just that.Funny, isn't it? I was bored out of my skull when I worked at a supermarket, but the politics and drama were effectively non-existent. I have no desire to go back, though, as the mental games you had to play to stay sane for a 6-8 hour shift were not worth it*.
*During one college summer, I was having difficulty convincing my coworkers (also college students) that it was impossible to slice exactly half a pound of meat at the deli. The statistics weeder class I had just taken had drilled into my mind that the probability a random variable falls within a range is the integral of the probability density function within the bounds of that range, and integrating any function from 0.5 to 0.5 would, naturally, yield zero.
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@Groaner said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
No offense but you're really reducing software development to about the level of stocking shelves at a store.
Actually, below that of some stores. I don't know what I'd do without my job at the store. The difference in reactions is like night and day. I can stock at twice the speed and a fraction of the error rate of most people and they
appreciate it (actually timed it for the first time in a few years this week...they keep telling me I'm fast but I couldn't see it until I saw the charts). On a slow day (truck was small or late), I can catch up on backstock or help another department without being backhanded. Hell, if I see a spill, getting a dustpan or a mop doesn't result in a "stay in your lane" lecture. If I walk out with a case of spaghetti sauce and it doesn't fit because somebody put tampons in its spot on the shelf, I don't have to go through three committees of diversity and inclusion to move the tampons where they're supposed to go and stock the spaghetti sauce where it belongs. If a customer asks me where something is or if we have more in the back, the expectation is that actually I'll help them right now and not put them through ServiceHow with a wait time measured in weeks. Coworkers even ask me questions and don't get bent out of shape that I can provide an answer or suggestion. It's everything I want in a development job but can't have for some reason. When my bills are down to the point I can pay them just working at a store, there's a chance I'll do just that.Funny, isn't it? I was bored out of my skull when I worked at a supermarket, but the politics and drama were effectively non-existent. I have no desire to go back, though, as the mental games you had to play to stay sane for a 6-8 hour shift were not worth it*.
*During one college summer, I was having difficulty convincing my coworkers (also college students) that it was impossible to slice exactly half a pound of meat at the deli. The statistics weeder class I had just taken had drilled into my mind that the probability a random variable falls within a range is the integral of the probability density function within the bounds of that range, and integrating any function from 0.5 to 0.5 would, naturally, yield zero.
I think the difference is between "for all intents and purposes, it's half" and "literally half". You're going to have juice and meat bits (no calculus required!) on the cutting device when you're done so you'll never have "literally half". But that's irrelevant for practical purposes.
Edit: you could have half of the remainder I suppose, but never half of the original.
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@Groaner said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
I was having difficulty convincing my coworkers (also college students) that it was impossible to slice exactly half a pound of meat at the deli.
"Exactly" to a layman means "within a reasonable tolerance" (I guess the resolution of the scales in this case). You were having trouble because they didn't understand the word 'exact' to mean the same as you did - because the mathematical meaning of it is completely useless in the real world (nothing would ever be 'exact').
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@mikehurley said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Groaner said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
No offense but you're really reducing software development to about the level of stocking shelves at a store.
Actually, below that of some stores. I don't know what I'd do without my job at the store. The difference in reactions is like night and day. I can stock at twice the speed and a fraction of the error rate of most people and they
appreciate it (actually timed it for the first time in a few years this week...they keep telling me I'm fast but I couldn't see it until I saw the charts). On a slow day (truck was small or late), I can catch up on backstock or help another department without being backhanded. Hell, if I see a spill, getting a dustpan or a mop doesn't result in a "stay in your lane" lecture. If I walk out with a case of spaghetti sauce and it doesn't fit because somebody put tampons in its spot on the shelf, I don't have to go through three committees of diversity and inclusion to move the tampons where they're supposed to go and stock the spaghetti sauce where it belongs. If a customer asks me where something is or if we have more in the back, the expectation is that actually I'll help them right now and not put them through ServiceHow with a wait time measured in weeks. Coworkers even ask me questions and don't get bent out of shape that I can provide an answer or suggestion. It's everything I want in a development job but can't have for some reason. When my bills are down to the point I can pay them just working at a store, there's a chance I'll do just that.Funny, isn't it? I was bored out of my skull when I worked at a supermarket, but the politics and drama were effectively non-existent. I have no desire to go back, though, as the mental games you had to play to stay sane for a 6-8 hour shift were not worth it*.
*During one college summer, I was having difficulty convincing my coworkers (also college students) that it was impossible to slice exactly half a pound of meat at the deli. The statistics weeder class I had just taken had drilled into my mind that the probability a random variable falls within a range is the integral of the probability density function within the bounds of that range, and integrating any function from 0.5 to 0.5 would, naturally, yield zero.
I think the difference is between "for all intents and purposes, it's half" and "literally half". You're going to have juice and meat bits (no calculus required!) on the cutting device when you're done so you'll never have "literally half". But that's irrelevant for practical purposes.
Edit: you could have half of the remainder I suppose, but never half of the original.
Or you could take your deli meats and weigh them in a geographical area with different average density (or on top of a mountain), but that's an order of magnitude more
than 21-year-old me was going for.
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@Groaner The only part that gets on my nerves now, besides the face mask requirement, is that every new manager starts out wanting to front the shelves before they're stocked. It makes no sense to pull everything forward right before pushing most of it back. But I've been in the supermarket game long enough to realize I only have to play along for a few weeks and it'll fall by the wayside just like every other time. Not like the All Seeing Eye of Sauron that is a dedicated style Nazi.
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@Groaner said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@mikehurley said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Groaner said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
No offense but you're really reducing software development to about the level of stocking shelves at a store.
Actually, below that of some stores. I don't know what I'd do without my job at the store. The difference in reactions is like night and day. I can stock at twice the speed and a fraction of the error rate of most people and they
appreciate it (actually timed it for the first time in a few years this week...they keep telling me I'm fast but I couldn't see it until I saw the charts). On a slow day (truck was small or late), I can catch up on backstock or help another department without being backhanded. Hell, if I see a spill, getting a dustpan or a mop doesn't result in a "stay in your lane" lecture. If I walk out with a case of spaghetti sauce and it doesn't fit because somebody put tampons in its spot on the shelf, I don't have to go through three committees of diversity and inclusion to move the tampons where they're supposed to go and stock the spaghetti sauce where it belongs. If a customer asks me where something is or if we have more in the back, the expectation is that actually I'll help them right now and not put them through ServiceHow with a wait time measured in weeks. Coworkers even ask me questions and don't get bent out of shape that I can provide an answer or suggestion. It's everything I want in a development job but can't have for some reason. When my bills are down to the point I can pay them just working at a store, there's a chance I'll do just that.Funny, isn't it? I was bored out of my skull when I worked at a supermarket, but the politics and drama were effectively non-existent. I have no desire to go back, though, as the mental games you had to play to stay sane for a 6-8 hour shift were not worth it*.
*During one college summer, I was having difficulty convincing my coworkers (also college students) that it was impossible to slice exactly half a pound of meat at the deli. The statistics weeder class I had just taken had drilled into my mind that the probability a random variable falls within a range is the integral of the probability density function within the bounds of that range, and integrating any function from 0.5 to 0.5 would, naturally, yield zero.
I think the difference is between "for all intents and purposes, it's half" and "literally half". You're going to have juice and meat bits (no calculus required!) on the cutting device when you're done so you'll never have "literally half". But that's irrelevant for practical purposes.
Edit: you could have half of the remainder I suppose, but never half of the original.
Or you could take your deli meats and weigh them in a geographical area with different average density (or on top of a mountain), but that's an order of magnitude more
than 21-year-old me was going for.That implies (together with the fact that gravitational fields are continuous) that it might be possible to find an area where the weight is exactly half a pound.
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@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
a non-IT IT shop that's furthermore a stepchild with a bad stepfather
So I will just expound upon this:
We've always had pockets of "IT" people that didn't want to actually do IT but there were more functional teams delivering value to the departments. OA never did IT. So as soon as IT (and HR) was put under them, they offshored a ton of stuff that used to be handled in-house and are constantly pushing to offshore more. User satisfaction and cost are rocketing in completely opposite directions (and I think you can guess which orientation).
A major issue is that "IT" is totally disconnected from the business now. The secretary of Revenue does not go to the CIO of Revenue and tell him what he wants so the Revenue programmers can build it. The secretary goes to the CIO of OA. If he feels like it, he (eventually) goes to the executives of the DC. If they feel like it, they stumble around trying to figure if another layer of management can find an Elections cog to plug into the Taxes machine. Usually somebody gives up and immediately says no and the Department of Revenue simply does without. On the rare occasion something does make it through all of these hurdles, it's the end of a telephone game with no return number. Picture Sam from Quantum Leap without Al or Ziggy to help him.
So you end up with this situation playing out over and over:
- Something is obviously broken.
- People calling in to scream at help desk or internal users crushed under productivity-destroying makework.
- Department management can't get it fixed because they have no IT people.
- OA management doesn't give a fuck because it's the department's problem.
- Oh me oh my why is everybody's perception of us so bad.
End result is that everything stays broken. Government is just the most obvious example. I have sat totally fucking idle for weeks/months in "private" jobs even though there were a billion things I could've been doing that would've taken 5 minutes of time they were already paying for. Then there's sudden hysteria over "somehow" not getting anything done. I couldn't exercise my own judgement and nobody would tell me what to do. Proverbial rock and a hard place.
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@dkf said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Groaner said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@mikehurley said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Groaner said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
No offense but you're really reducing software development to about the level of stocking shelves at a store.
Actually, below that of some stores. I don't know what I'd do without my job at the store. The difference in reactions is like night and day. I can stock at twice the speed and a fraction of the error rate of most people and they
appreciate it (actually timed it for the first time in a few years this week...they keep telling me I'm fast but I couldn't see it until I saw the charts). On a slow day (truck was small or late), I can catch up on backstock or help another department without being backhanded. Hell, if I see a spill, getting a dustpan or a mop doesn't result in a "stay in your lane" lecture. If I walk out with a case of spaghetti sauce and it doesn't fit because somebody put tampons in its spot on the shelf, I don't have to go through three committees of diversity and inclusion to move the tampons where they're supposed to go and stock the spaghetti sauce where it belongs. If a customer asks me where something is or if we have more in the back, the expectation is that actually I'll help them right now and not put them through ServiceHow with a wait time measured in weeks. Coworkers even ask me questions and don't get bent out of shape that I can provide an answer or suggestion. It's everything I want in a development job but can't have for some reason. When my bills are down to the point I can pay them just working at a store, there's a chance I'll do just that.Funny, isn't it? I was bored out of my skull when I worked at a supermarket, but the politics and drama were effectively non-existent. I have no desire to go back, though, as the mental games you had to play to stay sane for a 6-8 hour shift were not worth it*.
*During one college summer, I was having difficulty convincing my coworkers (also college students) that it was impossible to slice exactly half a pound of meat at the deli. The statistics weeder class I had just taken had drilled into my mind that the probability a random variable falls within a range is the integral of the probability density function within the bounds of that range, and integrating any function from 0.5 to 0.5 would, naturally, yield zero.
I think the difference is between "for all intents and purposes, it's half" and "literally half". You're going to have juice and meat bits (no calculus required!) on the cutting device when you're done so you'll never have "literally half". But that's irrelevant for practical purposes.
Edit: you could have half of the remainder I suppose, but never half of the original.
Or you could take your deli meats and weigh them in a geographical area with different average density (or on top of a mountain), but that's an order of magnitude more
than 21-year-old me was going for.That implies (together with the fact that gravitational fields are continuous) that it might be possible to find an area where the weight is exactly half a pound.
Absolutely. I imagine the contours of such an area could be described by a 0 cm-wide line, with a total enclosed area of 0 m2.
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@Zenith "No offense but you're really reducing software development to about the level of stocking shelves at a store."
But, that's exactly what it is! "Software development" requires very little skill, heck even 5-year olds can do it.
Meanwhile, stocking shelves isn't so simple. So let's focus on that. Pretend that the shelf-stocking technique I linked drastically improved sales, while not taking any longer to do after minimal training. What would you tell the highly-skilled shelf-stocker, if he came to you and said this:
I can't seem to find any work stocking shelves! Everyone just wants high-school kids, who work for basically nothing and they don't care about who can do the best job. Am I applying to the wrong stores?
When I do find work, they never want to hear about my ideas... they just want me to stock shelves. I can come up with creative solutions to their problems, and I take a real interest in their mission... but these stores, they just want the bottom dollar.
How can I make the case that they should hire me over over a high-school kid?
I'm encouraging you to "think outside the box of commoditized labor". The "shelf stocker" from that video isn't just stocking shelves, he's also _________ by stocking shelves in a _________ way?
Fill in the blanks. This is how you start with differentiation and messaging, two of the required things when you want to sell your own things (i.e. services) instead of being bought (i.e. hired).
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@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
It's funny we're having this conversation because I'm on a conference call right now where my boss is suddenly peddling a primitive version of the intranet site a colleague and I were trying to pitch almost two years ago at this point. We couldn't get any traction because Managed SharePoint was so ridiculously limited and no other options were entertained because we were supposed to stay in our lane and play technically helpless like good little MIS drones. That initiative, like everything else, was all Very Important for management except we had zero support on actually making something happen until the Right Person could get around to crapping whatever out.
I don't have any other context, but one thing that individual contributors (i.e. the troops) often lack is an understanding of the big picture goals and business priority. What may seem like a good idea on the ground isn't, but for reasons they don't understand. Typically, timing and risk.
When you say "primitive version", I hear "simpler", which really translates to "takes less time to create and is lower risk." Those are the best ideas to start with, really, when pitching things.
When you say, "two years ago", I hear "in a time of different priorities and different risks". Perhaps, at that time, the alternative solutions (Sharepoint?) wasn't "known to be shitty" by decision-makers, it was "maybe shitty because some MIS drones say it is, maybe good because «someone-else» says it is".
I'm speculating with zero context, but trying to give reasons why things like this happens.
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@Groaner said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
*During one college summer, I was having difficulty convincing my coworkers (also college students) that it was impossible to slice exactly half a pound of meat at the deli. The statistics weeder class I had just taken had drilled into my mind that the probability a random variable falls within a range is the integral of the probability density function within the bounds of that range, and integrating any function from 0.5 to 0.5 would, naturally, yield zero.
Imagine if after all these years, someone would prove you wrong.
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@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
User satisfaction and cost are rocketing in completely opposite directions (and I think you can guess which orientation).
I'm guessing it's not costs that were dropped off in the Delaware River with concrete overshoes.
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But, that's exactly what it is! "Software development" requires very little skill, heck even 5-year olds can do it.
The irony of saying that on this site of all places. I guess it's because you don't have context. I can't even submit stories to the front page anymore because people I've worked with would have to try first.
primitive
Well I mean that in two ways. One, managed SharePoint can barely do anything. It's baby's first site builder with about six awful half-baked controls, a choice of exactly two layouts (one "control" per row or two), no ability to theme, and no access control. For somebody that knows even basic HTML, it's so crippled it should be in a nursing home with X++. Geocities had better tools for crying out loud! Two, we'd put some thought and content to ours and what my boss showed was what we had in about 10 minutes of dragging and dropping. It's completely worthless, putting up a page just to mark off a checkbox in a marketing presentation. It has nothing to do with priorities or timing or learning - management doesn't trust anybody and this is just one of the myriad manifestations of that. Not even going into what a sad showing this is for so-called IT people.
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@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
managed SharePoint can barely do anything
That's OK. Nobody would be able to find what you wrote in it if you could do anything with it.
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@Zenith said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
But, that's exactly what it is! "Software development" requires very little skill, heck even 5-year olds can do it.
The irony of saying that on this site of all places. I guess it's because you don't have context.
That's my point, and why I'm challenging you.
You aren't providing any information about the "custom app development services" you want to provide/sell. How could anyone (most appropriately, a prospective buyer), differentiate your services from what their niece can do in MIT Scratch?
If you want to sell your own things (i.e. services you provide), you need to learn the skill of marketing and selling those things. Otherwise, you'll be about as successful as a child building business applications by dragging-and-dropping code.
You don't need to be great at it (it's fine to be average), but if you don't want to learn this skill, then you should consider focusing on other things. Becoming a contractor (where someone "buys" your hours) can be a good balance of freedom / work as well.
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I think someone should interview the author of SQLite who have got a nice mom-and-pop database shop with enough contracts for a lifetime of work, about how they (I think his wife manages the business side of things) made their business tick (I bet that, aside from pure technical prowess, they had some important acquaintances to kickstart it). When I grow up, I'd love to have a business like theirs.
But then again, to pull another SQLite, one needs to be waaaay above average in many respects.
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@wft said in Realistically, where would somebody advertise custom app development services?:
I think his wife manages the business side of things
I know Richard Hipp. No. It's in both their names for tax reasons. (His wife is a music educator if I remember right. I've never met her.)
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@wft finding a partner to compliment a skill-set you don't have is a great way to succeed. Unfortunately, finding that partner also requires some sort of marketing skill as well...
For me, a huge mistake that I made was a lack of a business plan. I watched people start a company after I did, and then sell it within years. The worst part is I helped them on their business plan.
Alas, a plan requires knowing what you want. And that is pretty difficult for some of us. Especially me.
