[A_D_E_P_T]

Remember those "day in the life of a Google Project Manager" videos, where they do nothing but hang out on Zoom meetings and pig out on free food and snacks?

Yeah, in many cases, those folks make roughly $235k/year. (And consume another $100k/year in lobster, shrimp, smoothies, and snickers bars.)

$235k is absolutely nothing for software development, and you probably won't be able to hire even one talented developer -- let alone a team -- with a war-chest that size.

[phpisthebest]

This type of attitude is exactly why silicon valley is primed for failure The bloat and the expense of silicon valley is going to be their downfall.

plenty of regions in the US and other nations have many talented developers that are willing to work for far less and make a far better product than what you get for silicon valley wages

[traceroute66]

> other nations have many talented developers

Yes there are other nations that have talented developers. But anywhere that has genuinely talented developers, the developers will still want a decent salary.

I'm not going to name names, but if you are thinking about the "outsourcing nations", then I don't know about you, but I think most of us here have experienced the poor quality coding output from those developers. The Quality Control simply is not there, normally because the company doing the outsourcing is too cheap to pay for proper supervision and quality control.

[maccard]

> I'm not going to name names, but if you are thinking about the "outsourcing nations", then I don't know about you,

I hate this crap. Some of the absolute worst code I've seen in my career was written by US programmers working out of tech hubs, as is some of the best code.

> But anywhere that has genuinely talented developers, the developers will still want a decent salary.

You're assuming that all "genuinely talented developers" are motivated solely by money and will move away from home, friends and family for a "decent salary". A salary of £80k in the UK (ignoring london just for a moment), or $100k USD is reasonable for a senior level engineer in the UK, will give you a very comfortable standard of living, and is less than you'd pay a junior in many parts of the US.

> The Quality Control simply is not there

That's not because of an "outsourcing nation", it's because you paid for a shitty outsourcer. See healthcare.gov [0] for a textbook example. Similarly, I've worked with "outsourcing nations" via EPAM with contractors in Mexico, Belarus, California, Hyderabad Romania and Bangkok, and the quality of code has not been tied to the location, it's been tied to QC at the relationship level.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov

[vGPU]

>some of the worst

Sure, but code put out by US coders I’ve hired has been consistently better than code that has been outsourced outside of the US.

Obviously, there are “diamonds in the rough” occasionally, but skilled people tend to get snapped up by a recruiter willing to file an immigration form for them very quickly.

[devoutsalsa]

We were all that crappy developer at some point…

[maccard]

That's one way of looking at it. Another is that someone who has 5+ years professional experience writing C++ shouldn't be writing `auto buf = new std::vector<int>()` to avoid heap allocations.

[phpisthebest]

Sure but a decent salary is far different from "235k/year. (And consume another $100k/year in lobster, shrimp, smoothies, and snickers bars.)"

If You can't see that there is a middle ground between impoverished wages and what was quoted above that I can't help you

[traceroute66]

> If You can't see that there is a middle ground between ...

I can see a middle ground. Most people would probably name it as Europe. And you would have to go looking in Eastern Europe.

And I think you would find, if you are lucky, that a competent European junior-ish developer would not get out of bed for less than 60k Euros (65k USD), a more senior developer would demand more.

And you need more than one or two developers on your team if you're going to be competing against Adobe.

And then you need to pay taxes, pensions, accountants and lawyers.

And then you need to pay other business expenses.

And if you decide you need an office, then god help you ...

The numbers soon add up .... $235k will disappear within the year, probably within a single quarter.

Software development is capital intensive.

[mhitza]

> And I think you would find, if you are lucky, that a competent European junior-ish developer would not get out of bed for less than 60k Euros (65k USD), a more senior developer would demand more.

That's a very much extreme statement I think you confabulated. Take this developer median data from back in 2020 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1222324/developers-media... and reanalyze your statement.

And also compared to https://www.reinisfischer.com/average-monthly-salary-europea... where 60k euros a year tends to be above the average monthly salary in many EU countries. And if a junior doesn't get out of bed for less than that, well I have some bad news for them and their expectations.

[KeplerBoy]

Are you actually in Europe?

You won't get qualified devs for much less than 60k around here. Especially since that is the amount of money people expect on their payslips before taxes.

On top of that employers have to pay additional stuff, that won't even make it on the payslip, like parts of the health insurance which are not considered to be parts of the compensation.

Quick Example from Austria:

* Cost to Employer 77k€

* Employee's Taxable Income: 60k€

* Income After Taxes: 40k€

* Childcare and University: 0€

[signal11]

> Most people would probably name it as Europe. And you would have to go looking in Eastern Europe.

Affinity[1] is a good example, I believe that’s created in Europe and its very reasonably priced.

Pixelmator too — based in Lithuania?

[1] https://affinity.serif.com/

[hardware2win]

>And I think you would find, if you are lucky, that a competent European junior-ish developer would not get out of bed for less than 60k Euros (65k USD), a more senior developer would demand more.

You realize that 60k usd after tax is 240k PLN which is like 6.6 times minimal wage?

This is good cash, not top, but good.

Junior people earn 36-120k PLN, so half of that.

[tuetuopay]

> And I think you would find, if you are lucky, that a competent European junior-ish developer would not get out of bed for less than 60k Euros (65k USD), a more senior developer would demand more.

Let me tell you that you are far off the reality. I live in Paris and junior developers don't get near as much as €60k/year. The 35-40k range is more realistic for juniors, and senior ones can get what, 90k? That's alread considered really good for an engineer here.

Of course you can make six figures, but that implies working for a silicon valley company that hires remotely in europe. And those that have offices in europe adjust their compensation accordingly.

Just for demonstration I looked at Datadog on levels.fyi for the three they accept to show me:

- Paris, $77k-$94k (so €70k-€85k)

- New York $180k (for level 1 SE, senior is through the roof)

[tsimionescu]

I'm not sure why you're comparing the cost of one SV dev with the cost of a while business unit in Europe.

[eastbound]

Located in France. A senior developer who performs bad work with a wage of 65k€ costs 100k€. Plus the office, wfh, computer, etc.

So $235k is 200k€ so one developer and one PM, because the dev alone has a brownian behavior concerning progress (unable to take initiative).

[kakwa_]

> I'm not going to name names, but if you are thinking about the "outsourcing nations", then I don't know about you, but I think most of us here have experienced the poor quality coding output from those developers.

I've experienced "poor quality coding outputs" caused by outsourcing in general... regardless if it was abroad or not.

With properly hired employees, in my experience, what they output is actually quite impressive both qualitatively and quantitatively. And their average salary is a fraction of mine, which is in turn a fraction of a US one (I'm West European).

[prakhar897]

I'll name it. You need at least 25000$ to hire a "decent" Software Dev and 50k for Senior Dev in India. They can produce much better output compared to US counterparts both in terms of Quantity and Quality.

The hiring needs to be direct or else the "agency" will eat most of the money and give you 3000$/yr "senior" devs further perpetuating the stereotypes.

With 235k, you can make an incredible 5 people team + cloud costs for an year.

[riffraff]

do you expect a year of 5 stellar devs will be enough to re-implement photoshop?

I am doubtful.

[hgsgm]

No, 1 stellar dev for 5 years. https://www.photopea.com/

[wiseowise]

Photopea dev hasn't worked a day in your run of the mill company. You won't find devs like that on a market.

[dismalpedigree]

Its not the skill of the developers thats the problem with offshoring. Its the communication breakdown and difficulty of specifying what you actually want built.

[reaperducer]

You need at least 25000$ to hire a "decent" Software Dev and 50k for Senior Dev in India. They can produce much better output compared to US counterparts both in terms of Quantity and Quality.

If that dev can't even put a dollar sign in the right place, then I'm not sure the quality is everything you claim.

Attention to detail matters. Especially in coding.

[wiseowise]

Laughable attempt to discredit someone.

> Attention to detail matters. Especially in coding.

Let me guess, you're one of those people who think nitpicking on every small thing leads to "quality" code?

[tuetuopay]

At least Europeans put the currency sign after the number.

If a dev cannot be United States centric and condescending, I'm not sure of their worth as an engineer.

[reaperducer]

The discussion is specifically about American salaries, so yes, the position of the dollar sign matters when someone is trying to brag about the quality of their work.

[computerfriend]

Different conventions exist. Personally, I put the unit after the quantity without exception.

[hotpotamus]

Yeah, I always found this to be an utterly strange convention. Do you say, "that'll be dollars one hundred", when you tell someone a price? Would you write, "I'm lbs200"?

I suppose it does give away the cultural difference, but this is one where the Indians (and a lot of others) get it right.

[CalRobert]

Very true, but a decent salary in, say, Poland is much less than in California.

[wiseowise]

Decent salary is 100k in Europe, for example.

[ohgodplsno]

Irrelevant and based on very specific US salaries (actually, no, US tech hub salaries), along with absolutely no guarantee of having talented developers even at prices above. Otherwise, Google would be filled with talented developers, and we all know that's not true.

The creator of the kickstarter lives in the UK. Even assuming the absolute worst of London salaries, you can pay for two developers, full time. If you look at other places in the UK or Europe that aren't overinflated with capital-city-salaries, there are a shitload of talented developers that will cost you anywhere from 50 to 100k a year. Eastern Europe is filled with extremely talented people.

[pillefitz]

In most countries for the majority of developers, $235k is a LOT of money and enough to finance a startup for the first two years or so with 2 developers.

[glimshe]

There is this romantic notion that the huge company gets it all wrong and a couple of guys in a garage with the right approach can dethrone them. The Apple story all over again. This success story is actually exceedingly rare in practice despite how much we like it.

But Abode isn't even that. They appear to want to create what Adobe creates, but with a small team. Something many other companies have failed to do with bigger teams and more funding. It's basically competing with Adobe at Adobe's game, but with a tiny fraction of the resources. Well, good luck to them, but meanwhile expect to pay Adobe's tax for a few years still...

[bsenftner]

Everyone misses that Adobe is not whatever software they are selling, they are that and a modern 16 deck luxury cruise ship completely loaded with marketing professionals. It's not only the software that has to be beat but that gargantuan marketing machine. It's that marketing machine that wins software battles these days - it sure ain't the software, as too much of it is not what the marketing claims.

[psd1]

True, but affordability and word-of-mouth can go a long way. It's not a foregone conclusion.

[traceroute66]

> Something many other companies have failed to do with bigger teams and more funding.

Even well-established companies once Adobe decides it wants in.

Remember QuarkXPress ?

It was THE desktop publishing software. Anybody who was anybody would use it. They had the monopoly.

Then along came Adobe with InDesign ... Quark are still around, but a shadow of their former shelves.

[robenkleene]

If anyone is interested, QuarkXPress to InDesign is one of the case studies in my piece on software transitions https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...

[cm2187]

It is however true that the friction, internal bureaucracy and absence of accountability makes large companies typically slow and delivering far inferior products and services than the talent they employ are capable of.

[A_D_E_P_T]

Maybe, if you're surviving on Ramen. That said, I wouldn't want to go up against Adobe with a team of two Ramen-fueled developers in Bulgaria.

I don't doubt you can make a cell phone app for that money, but something that would compete with Adobe's incredibly polished and well-funded software suite... I'm thinking the odds aren't good at all.

[jkukul]

$100k salary puts you in the top 5% of the society in Bulgaria. I wouldn't call that being "Ramen-fueled". I don't want people to get wrong ideas.

I agree with you that $235K is a small budget to build a serious software though.

[calculated]

It's actually a lot less than that. It's more like $50k. Just saying.

[ZephyrBlu]

Good luck taking on Adobe with 2 engineers.

[naillo]

Adobe seems exeptionally unproductive with incredible product stagnation so this doesn't seem that infeasible to me.

[Keyframe]

Exceptionally unproductive? What are you on about? Could they make larger swings? Sure. Are they exceptionally unproductive? Compared to whom? They dominate pretty much all market segments they're in. For example, they took on Apple, after a grudge, and won (Apple had something to do with that too). AI showed up, Adobe is pretty much the only major established player that put it in consumer hands ASAP and in a way that is both legal and makes great sense. Others (majors), if they even showed up with anything AI leaned on others (Microsoft -> OpenAI).

Adobe is moving at a steady strong pace which one cannot ignore. They don't have ferocity or (sometimes) velocity of a hungry small player.. yet, there aren't any in their space. There's Autodesk (lol) and of smaller in video there is The Foundry (if you want to see exceptionally unproductive, at small scale).

[whywhywhywhy]

> Compared to whom? - Procreate

- Figma

- Blender

- Maxon

- Davinchi

- Autodesk

- Stability

Honestly hard to name a company in the space shipping less than Adobe.

[Keyframe]

I'm the last person to stand behind Adobe (where my linux apps at?), but:

- procreate - yes, I agree. They do compete there and procreate is iPad only. Pricing is what sets them apart and Adobe being a bit stupid there

- Figma - yes and it's Adobe now.

- Blender and Maxon are in different space. Unless you consider Blender's subpar video capabilities and Maxon's buying of video plugins (for Adobe programs). Also, Maxon.. come on, talking about stale. C4D "light" is also part of After Effects.

- Blackmagic is in hardware business. Their Fusion (bought) is stale af. AVID might be a better comparison.

- Autodesk - only overlap is between Flame and Lustre. Flame is in another space where they don't compete and Lustre has been stale (just like Adobe's CC offerings, seems both ceeded to free DaVinci Resolve)

- Stability - look at how wonderfully Adobe actually did put out AI and integrated it well with Photoshop!

[pillefitz]

https://www.photopea.com/ started as a hobby project of a single guy and is surprisingly close to at least the core functionalities of Photoshop, certainly better than most open source applications.

[brmgb]

Well Figma started eating their lunch in 2015 having started with a 4 millions seed round and 15 employees for two years so it’s clearly is doable to take on Adobe with far less money that they themselves spend provided your offer is good.

[ZephyrBlu]

Please man, use your brain at least a little bit.

$235k and 2 engineers is completely different to $4M and 15 employees. Not to mention that it was 5-7yrs before Figma had any revenue.

"While Figma was founded in 2011, the first five years were spent trying to get to product. The company printed its first dollar in revenue in 2017 and will hit $400 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2022"

https://futurumgroup.com/insights/adobes-stock-got-slammed-f...

Figma is an outlier. "it's clearly doable to take on Adobe with far less money", he says about one of the fastest growing decacorn startups in history.

[brmgb]

> Please man, use your brain at least a little bit.

Thank you for being condescending. If you expected being a bully might shield you from tearing apart your argument you will be very disappointed.

15 people is a lot closer to two than to Adobe which is the point of my comment you entirely fail to grasp.

Every companies taking out a large companies is an outlier by definition. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist and remains a clear counterexample to your extremely wrong original opinion.

This discussion is finished as far as I’m concerned by the way. You have clearly demonstrated you are not worth talking to. I will let you massage your fragile ego by yourself.

[robenkleene]

Your timeline is wrong (Figma wasn't even released until 2016). I have a piece covering Photoshop to Sketch to Figma that I think illustrates in detail how the rise of Figma happened https://blog.robenkleene.com/2023/06/19/software-transitions...

[brmgb]

Yes, you are right. I was confused by what I read as they started offering a free preview in December 2015 and was convinced they released at the same time they did their serie A.

[boredumb]

Meh. You can get a good developer for 50-150k without lobster. You can't force them to all live in san francisco but I could hire two devs and have some marketing money left over with 235k with a year and a half ramp.

[sam_goody]

Well, no. If everything is open source, $235K is good for perks and incentives - and to ensure that the project is alive and active.

People will do a whole lot when the incentive is not the paycheck.

[gizmo]

Gimp and Paint.net have probably benefited from a million hours of open source labor and yet their capabilities are nowhere near Adobe's products.

People underestimate how much work commercial software takes by many orders of magnitude. This kickstarter is maybe performance art but if they're serious there is no chance in hell they will actually produce software that is actually competitive with an Adobe suite product.

[herbst]

No idea about Paint.Net but there is not a single thing i could name that I am missing with Gimp.

The only downside of Inkscape is that it doesn't properly open and save the most recent Adobe formats other than that I also have no idea why I would need anything more than what Inkscape offers.

Sure the Adobe tools have a lot to explore, a lot of buttons and options hidden in millions of submenus.

But a good portion of computer users have only a limited need for tools like this, no interest in that constant learning curve after major updates and no use for all those advanced features.

Imagine I learned using these tools 20 years ago, and while they heavily improved they still work exactly the same. Every time I meet Photoshop it 180d their design and button placements...

My point is you do not need to feature match Adobe to compete, making it more accessible alone could be a selling point.

[wiseowise]

> No idea about Paint.Net but there is not a single thing i could name that I am missing with Gimp.

> The only downside of Inkscape is that it doesn't properly open and save the most recent Adobe formats other than that I also have no idea why I would need anything more than what Inkscape offers.

Good for you. I can assure you that you'll find thousands of creative workers that will find what's missing from those tools.

> My point is you do not need to feature match Adobe to compete, making it more accessible alone could be a selling point.

That's why GIMP and Inkscape are industry standards that displaced Adobe tools.

[herbst]

> That's why GIMP and Inkscape are industry standards that displaced Adobe tools.

Depends where you go. If you go to a CCC event or a Linux shop I am sure they are.

[throwaway2990]

And yet gimp does not have the productivity to be used in a creative agency. So while you find gimp useful. It’s useless to pretty much every agency in existence.

[mejutoco]

As a counterexample, I would say Blender is even more complicated and is doing very well with the same model. Of course, it started as commercial software but still.

[cmiles74]

Perhaps this project will spend it's funding on a fork of Gimp that is more similar to the Photoshop UI and closes some of the gap in features.

[RobotToaster]

It's not open source

[justinclift]

Isn't the $235k only really needed to get them through their first prototypes?

When they can show working progress they can then do more fund raising, or maybe outright sales of the early releases?

[constantcrying]

They need $235k to get to their next round of funding. Which could be selling the prototype, more crowdfunding or other investment.

[TheHappyOddish]

I was going to say "what a weirdly US-centric" vie, but it's not even that. Most of th US population is nowhere close to that pay grade.

Silicoln Valley is living in a bubble. There are millions upon millions of talented developers out there earning a fraction of that but still enjoying a higher than cost of living wage.

[hardware2win]

You can EASILY get talented dev for 235k from cheap countries

[herbst]

I use Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, ... Except blender the others don't have any funding near those 250k and yet they compete very well to Adobe (I know many would deny that, but for me they do)

Money alone doesn't make good software.

[riffraff]

but the guy who started this kickstarter obviously does not feel that Gimp, Inkscape, Paint.net... are good enough, or he would not plan to build new tools.

So a zillion people working on gimp could not do it, while a handful with 250k in funding can?

This is performance art, not a project.

[onion2k]

you probably won't be able to hire even one talented developer -- let alone a team -- with a war-chest that size

Maybe you're not aware of this thing called equity, and how it's often a part of an offer to a founding engineer..