MAC SOFTWARE
Posted by on under fidelity investments, market turmoil, appetite, rush, investors, money | 
Fidelity Investments is joining the rush to satisfy investors' growing appetite for news about financial market turmoil.Posted by on under natural bias, apeman, sunny outlook, coue, rentacoder, ebay, average wage, low bid, spate, pitches, ly, programmers, guru, programmer, heroes, designers, peoe |
I've been a fan of Dan Appleman for about as long as I've been a professional programmer. He is one of my heroes. Unfortunately, Dan only blogs rarely, so I was heartened to see a spate of recent blog updates from him. One of the entries asks a question I've often wondered myself: can you really rent a coder?
Over the past year or two I've kept an eye on the various online consulting sites - Elance, guru.com, RentACoder, oDesk. I've actually used RentACoder once (as a buyer on a very small project) and was satisfied with the results -- though I suspect I spent more time writing the spec and managing the programmers than I would if I had done the work myself.
I'm surprised Dan opens with such a sunny outlook on these services, because I've heard almost universally negative things about them. As professional programmers, I think we're all naturally inclined to see these sort of low-bid contract sites as cannibalizing and cheapening our craft. It's roughly analogous to the No-Spec movement for designers.
The odd thing is that, despite the sunny outlook, the article Dan wrote on this topic comes across as quite cautionary:
- You'll be competing with people around the world. In fact, you'll be amazed at how little people in some parts of the world will bid. ThatÂ?s because a few dollars an hour can work well in a country where the average wage is a couple of hundred dollars a month.
- Many of the projects posted are unrealistic. For example, people asking for a clone of ebay for under $500. What ends up happening in these cases is that usually somebody ends up getting ripped off (either the client or the consultant who underbid or fails to deliver).
- A lot of projects go bad. They get cancelled. Or the consultant who bid on the work never delivered, or delivered poor results. Or the client has unreasonable expectations, or doesnÂ?t actually know what he wants.
Maybe it's just my natural bias talking, but these sites seem awfully impractical to me.
Simply sorting out the DailyWTF project pitches from things you could actually deliver -- at ultra-competitive offshore programming rates, no less -- would require the patience of a saint and the endurance of an olympic athlete. Specification documents are hard enough to write when everyone involved is a coworker sitting in the same room. I can't even imagine the difficulty of agreeing on what it is you're building when the participants are thousands of miles away and have never met. But then I thought Amazon's Mechanical Turk was a failure, and it seems to be enjoying a moderate level of success.
Dan has a small chart comparing the services of these online freelance/consulting sites. It's too easy to write these sites off as an affront to software engineering. I guess they're sort of like dating sites -- they might be one way to find a client relationship, but I'd be highly suspicious of any professional developer who can't find a stable, long term relationship with a client eventually.
If nothing else, we should be looking at them for research purposes, as a baseline. Surely you can demonstrate better value to your employer than the random, anonymous programmers on Elance, guru.com, RentACoder, or oDesk. And I'd certainly hope that the projects you're working on are more sensible and rewarding (in both senses of the word) than the stuff that appears on those sites.
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Tagi: natural bias, apeman, sunny outlook, coue, rentacoder, ebay, average wage, low bid, spate, pitches, ly, programmers, guru, programmer, heroes, designers, peoe
Posted by on under wink wink nudge nudge, hockey puck, logitech mice, scroll wheel, mutant mouse, mx500, compas, prototypes, gadgets, creatures, wheel |
I love Logitech mice, so I actually dug their shameless mouse timeline. Even more awesome, though, are these amazing prototypes that never left their lab, like the three-scroll wheel monstrosity and hockey puck above.
They get wonderfully cheeky about them too, saying that the hockey-puck mouse "looked cool but turned out to be less than comfortable." (WINK WINK NUDGE NUDGE.) Here are a few of the more ridiculous ones, but be sure to check out the whole run. It's hard to believe some these even made it off the page, much less into a polished, physical form in some cases. Of course, none of them will ever top my beloved, retired MX500.
Really fantastic. I wish more companies would show us some of their aborted lab creatures. [Blogitech (PDF) via BoingBoing Gadgets]
Posted by on under chicago sun times, globe and mail, bush tax cuts, billis, washingt times, tax incentives, wall street journal, obama, investment tax, billi, detroit news, los angeles times, labor day, reuters, tax breaks, pitches, wall street, news articles, tens, alg |
 Globe and Mail | Obama's big tax plans Chicago Sun-Times President Obama today plans to propose $30 billion in new investment tax breaks for businesses to go along with tens of billions in spending he called for on Labor Day to invigorate the slow recovery. At the heart of Obama's plan: accelerating ... Obama set against Bush tax cuts Washington Post Businesses like Obama tax write-off plan but want to keep Bush tax cuts too Los Angeles Times Obama pitches road spending, tax incentives in Ohio Reuters Wall Street Journal - The Detroit News - Washington Times all 4,341 news articles » |
