Bring It On

Not that I had zillions of visitors, but I have a few posts in my pipeline that might draw some attention here, so I'd better be prepared. As I already keep some of my stuff in MSDE, .Text won over dasBlog, even though the latter looks to be better feature-wise. dasBlog was closer in spirit to my solution, but I liked simplicity of backing up only a database along with rest of my data. The fact that hundreds of Microsoft bloggers are using .Text speaks for itself as well.

The other day Chris Sells predicted where software development could be going. Sells argues that "As connectedness improves, the importance of being on site declines, the perfect market for services will develop, giving us eBay for employment".

So I went to the Rent A Coder site to check it out, and boy, was I in for a surprise.

The site is what it seems to be - organized market for buyers and sellers of software development (and related) services. It has a little spin on it, though, as there is a bidding involved, plus both buyers and sellers rate each others' reliability. But when you dive in and actually read some of the offers, you notice that they fall into following categories:

1. People using the software that want some very specific feature that authors ar not willing to put in. This probably makes most sense for a site like this.
2. Students wanting someone to do their homework. Programmers in need of a class or two to solve issue that is not core to the function of their software product. This also makes perfect sense.
3. Various bozos who want clones of commercial software dirt cheap. Say, could anyone build me Microsoft Office 2003 clone for (generous) $3K? These self proclaimed entrepreneurs think that they could rent someone to produce a cash cow for them in a matter of few months, and that this is worth few thou? What are they smoking (I'd like some of that, please, I bet the world would look so much better)? Now, I realize that these people obviously have no idea about software development, but would you even consider asking someone to build you a car from scratch for $100K? We are talking about basic rules of goods production. If something costs $10, it doesn't mean that it can be produced for few times as much. If you want completely customized product, or an exclusive deal (unique piece) in any industry, you'd pay a lot. Why would software development be any different? This is just another manifestation of how stupid and greedy people can be, and how everything looks simpler from the "outside".