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by dboreham 1801 days ago
Instead, we as an industry prefer to adopt magical thinking where we pretend that software projects aren't hard and lengthy and risky (even when the domain and tech are well understood), then we act surprised when the project "overruns".
2 comments
mdtusz 1801 days ago
This is extremely difficult to convey to non-developers though because they often look at software as a house and think "there's tons of houses (ecommerce sites) built every day and it's down to a science - how hard can a house (ecommerce site) really be", but miss out on the fact that all houses have pretty much the same structure of a foundation, framing, wiring and plumbing, and a covering of paint and a roof - this is largely kept consistent and we'll implemented by building codes.

I can only speak from my own experience, but every single web application I've worked on has had a wildly different structure than the others and the only consistent thing between them has been endpoint routing mechanisms.

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rmah 1801 days ago
Then this is, IMO, a problem with the software developers (in the broadest sense, not just programmers). Most e-commerce in fact, DO share the same framing, wiring and plumbing as all the others. This is why you can buy an e-commerce package off-the-shelf and customize it.

If the business is a relatively generic e-commerce store, it should usually not be building bespoke e-commerce software. Unless, of course, there is some technology feature that will be your competitive advantage/differentiator. But let's be honest, that's pretty damn rare in the space of e-commerce stores.

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hnbad 1801 days ago
I'm not saying that this isn't a good estimate for "doing it properly". I'm just saying that no client will let me bill half a million dollars and spend the better part of a year to build them a bare bones ecommerce website from scratch that doesn't even have invoicing or an admin interface.

I'm mostly just saying if the author is able to sell what amounts to half a broken Woocommerce installation for half a million dollars (assuming it's at least a team of two billed at $20/hr), I must be in the wrong market.

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