[ezl]

they try.

i've worked with agencies big and small, and above a certain size threshold they'll typically have some sort of in house IT staff. These tend to be generalists and don't "do software" the way "we" (hn, silicon valley, anyone who knows what techcrunch is, who has heard of fog creek) do.

they often hack together brittle solutions, do a lot of herky jerky deployment efforts that never make it to the finish line, allocate 25k to a local development shop and end up unhappy with the deliverable, etc.

Software is hard. it is fraught with challenges. but many businesses, real estate included, assume that it can be done well with a minimal spec and non-expert developers ("hot shot CS graduate with a 3.8+ GPA" is NOT a sufficient condition for assessing excellence and ability to ship code).

So they fail.

And they often then claim that tech is the problem and that developers are incompetent. It's a very long uphill battle to explain how you can deliver better, faster, at a fraction of the cost.

But we can.