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Wednesday, May 12, 2021

(54) Tim Mensch's answer to Why would a company pay $120K/year for a programmer when they can get 10 outsourced programmers for the amount? - Quora

https://www.quora.com/Why-would-a-company-pay-120K-year-for-a-programmer-when-they-can-get-10-outsourced-programmers-for-the-amount/answer/Tim-Mensch

The quote I love is, "There is no number of ordinary eight-year-olds who, when organized into a team, will become smart enough to beat a grandmaster in chess."[1]

There are some things that you need a talented programmer to achieve. Period. And even in India, the really talented ones make well over $6/hour. I've seen $40/hour, which, at 40 hours per week, comes to about $80k/year. And ten at $120k/year is only $6/hour, so at that price you're really getting the worst developers around.

Even if your problem isn't the most complex, if you need it to scale, it may not be possible if you don't have a "grandmaster" at least overseeing your team. You're certainly going to have problems if you only have a team of barely competent (if that) developers.

I've come in to help some teams with projects where they'd spent over a million dollars on development. In one case, development lasted over three years on a team of 18 full time developers at roughly $9/hour each, and they even had a site that functioned exactly as they asked so far, but then they realized they needed deep links[1] and didn't have them. The team came back and told them it was impossible. Not expensive, but impossible to complete without a from-scratch rewrite. (And they didn't have any proof that their site would scale, which I was seriously doubting given their stack.)

They came to me to ask if I could add the feature, but our estimate basically involved a ground-up rewrite that cost almost as much as they had spent so far in the development. They simply no longer had the budget to start from scratch.

And note that my team, for roughly the same price, would have been able to finish their site in about six to eight months. Not three years. And given that they could have been making money over those extra two and a half years, their overall opportunity losses could have been in the millions, if their app took off, plus probably another million in saved expenses paying US salaries while they were waiting for the app to be completed. And our version would have scaled, and would have been flexible enough to handle other common requests as well.

Software development is a skilled profession that exists at a crossroads between engineering, art, and mathematics. When you're building a house you don't go out and hire minimum wage bricklayers to design and build the whole thing and hope for the best. You hire an architect and a general contractor, and they consult with a structural engineer.

But if you're hiring ten developers at $120k/year total, then you are just getting the equivalent of bricklayers, when what you actually need is an expert and a much smaller team.

(Edited to explain a couple of points that people were confused by in the comments.)

Footnotes

[1] Deep linking - Wikipedia

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