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by msandford
4036 days ago
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> Time tracking is one of those things that I see constantly being reinvented. Whether it's spreadsheets that get emailed, completely custom solutions, or one of the numerous services available, few of them actually provide anything new. I think that's because nobody provides enough hooks in enough different places to make something work for everyone. I'd call it the SAP problem. First you spend $3mm buying it and then you spend another $20mm customizing it. Once the assumptions about how something will work are baked in, it's very difficult to change the database schema without breaking everything, and writing a translation layer on top of it is probably more work that it's worth. A truly universal time tracking app would take a few years and a few million to develop properly so that it can be extended and changed and customized and by the time you've supported a million different use-cases it would have been easier for a dozen different people to write their own. |
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* It's a problem lots of programmers have (programmers always solve problems they themselves have first) * It's a problem that seems like it should be easy to solve * It's a problem that doesn't require a large team to bootstrap an MVP
So you get a lot of "version 0.1" type solutions, as people set own to scratch their own personal itches. But then once version 0.1 is out the door they start looking at other peoples' itches, discover that there's a bazillion little wrinkles and corner cases that make it hard to evolve a specialized tool into a more general-purpose one-size-fits-all-one, so they just settle for leaving their own tool as it is rather than trying to address all those corner cases to get it to a "version 1.0" level.