On: The Imposter's Handbook

[gthtjtkt]

Just throwing my anecdote in the ring: I work with a small team (4 devs) in at a non-tech company. The other devs all have 10+ years experience and none even know what SOLID is.

I've never asked, but I'm guessing they don't know about any of the other things you mentioned either.

There's an ocean of small/medium businesses who just need to get shit done and don't need it optimized so it can scale to serve 7 billion people every day while running on a 1997 microwave.

HN seems to overlook that market entirely. Not hip/trendy enough, I suppose. Consultants are billing $250/hr just to write CRUD apps or reports, and they're completely booked.

[DanHulton → gthtjtkt]

I mean... which consultants? In which industry? And who else works in that industry? And do you have phone numbers?

Just... asking. You know, for reasons.

[gthtjtkt → DanHulton]

Legal industry, in a branch of the law that's very high volume. We were paying a consultant $175/hr just to create basic SSRS reports until I learned to do it. I'm sure plenty of other firms are still hiring outside devs at exorbitant rates.

And when I explain what I do (mostly automating clerical or data entry/retrieval processes) to friends in other fields, a lot of them have said "Wow, we could use a lot of that at our company. We do X and Y and Z over and over and it's a huge waste of time." Small companies often force highly-skilled workers to complete their own repetitive clerical tasks, and medium companies seem to hire teams of $10/hr drones. They never think "At what point is this worth automating?" or they don't know where to look for a dev who can do it for them.

I think the small/medium business CRUD app market is extremely neglected because it's not as glamorous as machine learning or whatever else all the MIT grads are doing these days.