My 2 cents is that it's going to be mostly recruiters, sales, customer success, and other misc operations folks. That's the pattern I've been observing since the post-covid layoffs have begun.
Lots of large corporations have (or at least, had) archivists.
The last time I dealt with one was as a subcontractor for Lockheed Martin. The archivists I worked with were responsible for maintaining the code and documentation for all of the satellites they had ever worked on.
If you need to see the design documents for a satellite that was built 40 years ago by a company gobbled up by LM four or five acquisitions ago, whose engineers are all gone (or dead), you shoot off an email, have about 20 managers sign off on it, and in a couple of weeks someone goes and finds the actual, real, documents that have been rolled up in a tube in a cave somewhere since the 80s and either ships them to you or emails you a scan.
There are videos that went "viral" a few months back of the Lego archives which are fun to watch. Lego has tried to archive at least one of every set they ever produced and store it in a small library in Denmark. Those videos are fun to watch people nerd out about all the history there. The video I recall watching was a car blogger who got to point out the entire history of Lego's car partnerships.
One of the companies I worked for the building I was in was many states over from the company headquarters but was also one of the biggest warehouse buildings the company owned so it had a sizeable chunk of the company's archives. A lot of key pieces were put out on display in the entry space by the main entrance as a small mini-museum of company history. For some training work a couple team members and I had a reason (I forget exactly what) to visit some of the deeper archives. The company's real history only started in the 1990s, so even the deeper archives weren't all that deep, but still an interesting dive through hardware history (in this case of credit card payment processing equipment). (The mini-museum claimed some vague connections to a few more decades of history of the credit card industry as a whole, but that was a bit of bravado and salesmanship of indirect associations more than direct history experienced by the company itself.)
Gambling in general is a loser's game, but the games people TYPICALLY play in gambling isn't generational wealth.
What makes the lottery slightly different is "YOLO": yeah on average it is not a good play, but someone presumably wins, and for their one shot in life it gets transformed with generational wealth.
That is: go big or go home.
... well, except that most lottery winners lose it all, but that's a different issue.
To emphasize, I'm not advocating playing the lottery, just that odds don't really account for the biological reality of only getting one life to live.
Some quick back of the envelope calculations suggests that powerball becomes positive estimated value at about 650mil for jackpot or above (though if we want to discount for taxes, lump sum etc, high than that) but obviously that EV is massively weighted towards one very very very rare event
I've got no qualms with folks who can afford it playing the big jackpots from time to time, especially because the money coming in is typically earmarked for positive social programs.
>because the money coming in is typically earmarked for positive social programs
Ostensibly it's "earmarked" ... but by supposed earmarking, legislatures think they can otherwise defund said "positive social programs" from the general budget
This is a serious question: Do any of you folks get paid good money to start projects? In my career I have "started" projects for maybe 2-5% of my time. All of the real effort goes in to massaging the app to actually solve unique business problems, about 80-90% on edge cases.
Bold and cynical claim: Making and selling apps like this is akin to building a social media brand about building social media brands. The problem this solves is only experienced by serial creators who like starting projects, not making useful stuff. I personally know 2 people who are like that attempted to start this exact same concept for a company, and that was like 6 years ago, and it was Rails too.
> Making and selling apps like this is akin to building a social media brand about building social media brands
So much this.
I really can't understand all the excitement above, unless you're starting a new proof of concept daily (but then, the price looks ridiculous) and you're ready for the "buy now - pay later" way of development. If "move fast break things" is still the thing in 2022, then it makes more sense to just draft an MVP in html/js with something like Firestore as a backend?
"draft an MVP in html/js with something like Firestore as a backend"... so much here. It sounds easy, but is it? I remember the days when I would get stuck on a webpacker config issue instead of working on the real meat of my app.
I speak weekly with developers that tell me "oh, you made an admin panel. I could build that in a few hours. we don't need it." and they never do. They really can't. It's a tough thing to make something quick, reliable, and that gives you no headaches in the short and long run.
And, I guess the excitement is not just for building MVPs, but in general for how much things have evolved and that we have alternatives to copy and pasting forms and fields around.
I'm not going to say that everyone should use Avo. I believe that each developer vibes with some technologies. That's why we use ruby, PHP, JS, VSCode, vim, chrome, firefox, linux or macs. Because we understand them, think in that way, and push out great work with them. So yeah, if Firestore is your thing you should use it. I'm not pointing any fingers.
> "oh, you made an admin panel. I could build that in a few hours. we don't need it." and they never do.
I was never saying making anything with any technology is easy.
Developing with plain Rails and a minimum of gems is linearly difficult while developing with a set of DSL/generators like Avo can lead to a complexity spike from 1 to 11 in no time. And the worst thing — at a random stage of development.
From the business perspective of view, I really like it: it's a perfect example of a micro-project and I wish you the most of luck.
I wholeheartedly agree with this post. I have used/tried every admin panel creator gem under the sun. Or other 'quickstart' products out there such as Jumpstart. Other than that there has been several efforts to make admin panels for rapid app creation that come with some CSS flavor. And always end up hitting the same ceiling, that one feature that cannot be created due to DLS limitations or whatever, and then its all back to square one just that now you have to hack the shit out of the app to make things work.
Never going down the road of using tools like OP's one, I rather spend more time writing boilerplate, which in the end is what's saving here.
It does look like a nicely crafted project and I wish OP luck with it.
I believe that no tool is perfect. Not even Rails. We reach for other gems and sometimes do things not "the Rails way" and we get the job done.
And there's a fallacy there. We don't go saying "Rails doesn't do everything I need it to do, so I'd rather spend more time to write my framework from scratch". But we're (and I'm including myself too) very quick to say things like that about certain tools just because "it's never been done before", "Nobody uses an off-the-shelf package to build their app on", "I'll hit a ceiling with it...", and so on.
Yes, Avo isn't perfect, and yes, Avo isn't right for any kind of project. There are some that are more suited and some that aren't. Sometimes you might hit a "ceiling" with Avo, but I baked in a ton of "escape hatches" (add own content on multiple levels, override views, override controllers, multiple ways of interacting with the data, Stimulus JS). Using these "escape hatches" (I gotta stop using that term), will help you get the job done.
This message is not fingepointing towards you or anyone else, and I respect everyone's way of doing things, but we should take some time and reflect on that. We don't go and build linuxes, nginxes, pumas, railses and other pieces of tooling everytime beacause we might get stuck at one point. We make it work. Same should apply with pieces of software like Avo.
> "Developing with plain Rails and a minimum of gems is linearly difficult while developing with a set of DSL/generators like Avo can lead to a complexity spike from 1 to 11 in no time. And the worst thing — at a random stage of development"
A very pertinent question. If you're asking if Avo "pays the bills", it doesn't. I hope it will some day. Damn, I hope I earn money in some other way and donate Avo to Ruby central, becomes free so it becomes the default way of building Rails apps.
Until that time, I am pretty stocked that other developers want (and pay) to use something I've created.
Yeah, it takes a lot to build the messaging around a product. This current message "Build apps 10x faster" is probably the 10th or 20th iteration. I had to speak with a lot of users and try to figure out how it helps them in their daily dev life.
Building the product is the easy thing (for a developer), doing the marketing, steering it into the right direction, figuring out what the best features are, sales, funnels, etc. Those are the difficult things. They are difficult for me because I don't have a following.
Regarding your "Bold and cynical claim", I respect your opinion. I wouldn't go to say that everyone just want to build a following and launch useless product to achieve that.
Oh, I see what you mean. What kind of "gigs" they get. "Starters" or "continuers" (maintenance).
Gotcha! Personally I started a lot of projects. Probably more than 50%. And the money were good, but not as good as doing maintenance for a big company with a big product.
I've been working on four projects in the last 12 months. I helped starting one of them in 2017 (Elixir / Phoenix.) I inherited a RoR one in 2012 and two Django ones in 2016 and 2019.
Given the long life of projects that make money one doesn't start many of them but being able to show something in a short time is important. It helps to focus on features and not to get lost in architectural yak shaving.
> Do any of you folks get paid good money to start projects?
I would argue with this thesis. There is a whole market of templates: themeforest, wrapbootstrap, template monster, creative-tim, flatlogic (my company) and others.
Templates are solely used to start the project, so I would say that the market is large
‘Defund the police’ is what you see on the signs at democrat protests.
When you get in a discussion, it’s not quite what they mean, but that just means it’s a stupid slogan where you have to redefine every word to get at what you mean.
"Defund the police" is more of a Republican parody of Democrats than anything else. It's a Fox News slogan. No substantial portion of the Democratic Party supports this, or ever has.
But it's a great way to lie about your political opponents to keep anything rational from being done about gun violence or other issues.
The slogans "Defund the police" and even "Abolish the police" were in fact quite common in BLM protests and the like. They're not something that Fox News just came up with to ridicule Democrats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defund_the_police
You're gonna publicly confront this person who has reached out to you? I think you just lost a lot of goodwill from the participants of this discussion.
It actually makes me wonder how responsible you are for the misfortune you've experienced in your career.
The correct response here was "Thank you very much, I'll be in touch!" or something to that effect. I agree publicly confronting the recruiter is a bit of a strange move here, not sure what outcome they are hoping for.
I don't think it's the recruiter, but the CEO/founder. And it's not confrontation, he wanted to public offer help so I publicly pointed out he's done that before and it resulted in sitcom like results.
I doubt a recruiter is going to have the ryan@ email address over the CEO/founder.
Really works for me. I make more money and have a lot more influence on my world. I am a total control freak though, and really can't get satisfaction if I'm not able to make real changes to my organization.
- Nobody will tell you, or even know, if you're doing a good job. Meaningful metrics are trailing and your reports will lie to you instead of giving you constructive feedback. A lot of the time they simply don't think about what kind of feedback will help you.
- You will ruin peoples' dinners. You will make decisions that will cause people to complain about you at home and be nasty to their family members. Sometimes it's because you made a mistake and sometimes it's business. Get right back on that horse.
- You are actually in charge, accountable, and responsible for some or all of your department. That can cause a lot of anxiety, and may result in some uncomfortable time commitments. You might coordinate a disaster response and have absolutely nothing to contribute except imparting a sense of urgency. It is very hard for me to take time off, whereas when I was a dev I could easily slack on Thursday that I'm blowing off the rest of the week since I met my commitments.
- Time management, oh my goodness. You will start some days with an empty calendar and not get off of the phone until 6. Or you may actually get a free day and decide it's really important to build some workflow automation for your dev team tools. This is where having tech chops makes the job super fun.
- Seeing people grow and internalize your advice. Hearing your own words or seeing your own behavior in up and comers is easily the most rewarding experience I've had professionally.
- You really don't get new information and there are really no secrets. I kinda expected to be privy to all kinds of performance and comp data but we're all just winging it.
> your reports will lie to you instead of giving you constructive feedback
because if the manager has ego problems he has the power to make your life miserable if you give a honest feedback so the best solution for your direct reports is be diplomatic not not give a honest feedback.
