"Let's go for the low hanging fruit first" 🤢

"I think we should do some market research" 🤢

"Yeah that is also on my radar" 🤢

OKAY YOU FUCKING CUNT, STOP WITH YOUR PATRONIZING SHIT.

FIRST OF ALL, ARE YOU REALLY SO SMALL MINDED THAT YOU CAN'T REACH ANY HIGHER? THIS TREE IS FUCKING RAW AMD BARE ON THE BOTTOM, WITH YOUR FILTHY CLAWS GRASPING FOR ALL THOSE EASY NARROW FIXES.

SECONDLY, A FUCKING EMAIL SURVEY WITH BIASED QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY 3 HOBOS IS NOT BLOODY MARKET RESEARCH.

THIRDLY, IF THIS NUCLEAR ICBM OF AN INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEM IS ON YOUR RADAR, MAYBE STOP FONDLING YOUR SWEATY BALLS FOR A MINUTE AND TAKE ACTION.

"Okay lets peel this onion, so we hit the ground running" 😩🤢😞

NO, LET'S NOT "HIT THE GROUND RUNNING", YOU'RE GOING TO FUCKING TRIP AND MESS UP YOUR FACE EVEN MORE. HOW ABOUT GET YOUR PILE OF SHIT IN ORDER FOR ONCE, PREPARE FOR A MEETING? HOW ABOUT THOUGHTFUL ACTION, SOME FEATURE DESIGN?

"No, just implement it quick and dirty" 🤢😡👿

OH YOU WANT IT QUICK AND DIRTY? IS THAT HOW YOU FUCK YOUR DAD AS WELL?

"Let's evaluate the fix in a few weeks. We really had good synergy here team" 🤢😫

YEAH SURE, LET'S EVALUATE THIS.... BUT LET'S EVALUATE IT RIGHT NOW: 😡

"Ahem....

1. You're always late for meetings.
2. After 6 months, you still barely know what we do as a company, you still don't know the teams, and you still don't know the product.
3. You do not listen to engineers flooding you with red flags, requiring time for a redesign to fix serious scaling issues.
4. Everything must be a quickfix, nothing is allowed to require thought, because you CAN ABSOLUTELY NOT think ahead for more than 30 seconds.

OH AND IF YOU EVER AGAIN COVER UP ONE OF YOUR MANY SHORTCOMINGS WITH THAT FUCKING SLIMEY DOUCHEBAG MANAGER VOCABULARY OF YOURS, LET'S SEE HOW MUCH SYNERGY YOU FEEL WHEN YOU'RE DEEPTHROATHING A CACTUS."

1) I accepted this job for way way less money than market value.

2) Approached boss about having performance review because I had been here over 12 months and no one brought it up to me.

3) Had performance review where they offered a big raise (12% but still way under market value)

4) I countered asking for market value and showed aggregate research (30% increase)

5) A week later we meet again and they offer 23%.

6) That's where we ended at, pretty surprised they offered that much, but glad. I wasn't looking forward to looking at other jobs to catch up to market value.

7) Feeling pretty good considering I've never negotiated anything before.

So a guy wants to start a company with me. He wants to be CEO 👨‍💼 I'm fine with it but now he also wants me to obey every one of his orders such as attend long unplanned meetings, go do market research, code the app and for what, a mere 5%. He gets a bigger cut of the income because he came up with the idea 💡, he also gets to sit and order me around because he's read a few books on business and economics. People don't seem to understand the difference between having an idea and implementation. I just left and said no to every offer he had the highest of which was 10%, don't be worried about the money he says this is a real opportunity for you. I mean wtf is wrong with some people.

Unpopular opinion: I hate when people start their rants with "unpopular opinion". Most of the time it seems like a pretty standard opinion too! "Unpopular opinion: I hate Wordpress" Yeah so does a lot of people! Just rant for rantings sake! Don't give me your inaccurate market research as a part of the deal!

Adventures​ Of The New COO

So when that new COO joined our company ( read my previous rant to know that story ) he brought a graphic designer with him

as a designer he's ok, more of a old school package designer type, but as a person one of the most annoying one I've ever met, always want to be included with our conversations, talk about rain and stuff

so few days ago, i was working on a website, headphones plugged in, music playing, he comes near my seat

Designer​: Are you busy ?
Me: yeah, I've this website to finish
Designer: So i have this idea for an app
Me: *taking off headphones while thinking doesn't this dumbass know the meaning of busy*
Designer: what if we create an app for super markets, like this isle has this stuff, that isle has soap or something and how it'll be easy to find what you want to buy and keeps going on and on for about 5 minutes
Me: *making my voice as polite and sarcastic as possible*
It wouldn't work, every market has a different layout even among same market chain it's different
Me: have you ever been to a super market, they have a board saying what the isle is above the isle, all you have to do is just look up
Designer​: hmm yeah i guess
*walks away*

everyone​ wants to make apps and make money, but doesn't have the fucking brain capacity to think about the idea for a bit and do some research, instead they come and waste our time

Is it OK to lie to recruiters about your current salary to get a bigger increase if applying for jobs?

One of them told me I should lower my preferred salary (even though I've done research on the market) because it is more than the norm of a 10% increase.

I want to earn what I deserve, not what some titface recruiter dictates.

So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.

I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.

Here's my problems with this place:

1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.

2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.

3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.

4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.

5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.

6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.

7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.

8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.

9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.

10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.

11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.

Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.

My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.

I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

Signed up for a market research company (ironically, that I used to work for as a transcriber about 10 years ago) to pull in a bit of extra cash.

They sent an e-mail back confirming my registration.

With the password in plaintext.

We have a course in our uni where we're given a client and are supposed to make a product for him.
> Only, our client happens to be a startup guy.
> He's already mentioned that his app is worth 'multi-millions' countless times.
> And has already given us a job offer in his startup.
> And has offered to pitch the app to investors if we do it right and split the profit (He seemed almost convinced Google would acquire it).

All of it before doing any market research, testing, business planning or prototyping himself.
Yet people ask me why i hate on the hyped up startup ecosystem smh :/

I wanted to create a microcontroller website. It would feature simple circuits and microcontroller code to build things. The intent was to show absolute beginner concepts to people. Since I am older than the whipper snappers out there I thought I would have concept of some old man running the website.

I found cartoon artwork featuring an old man and I also got the domain oldmanmicro.com. I then created a bunch of pages featuring some really basic circuits. I setup an affiliate program with amazon to provide kits to people and embedded those into the website. This site was going to take a lot of creativity. I struggled with what to put on the site. This was going to take time. At this point I felt pretty good with my progress. It looked nice, the links were good, etc.

Then I did web search for oldmanmicro. I found my website in top hits. I also found something else... The 3rd or fourth hit down was some fucking old dude with a micro penis website. WTF! The worst possible combination of letters in my domain name produce this terrible experience. I was already struggling with content ideas, and this just demoralized my efforts. Thus ended the tale of the oldmanmicro.com. Perhaps the micro penis guy bought it, I don't know. I am afraid to look.

This was my very ignorant adventure with not researching a domain name thoroughly.

I got a little jaded at work (the normal officer politics stuff), so I started doing less work, and reaching out to recruiters.

My boss noticed I was having a go, reached out and offered a raise and a new computer. I told him I'd have to research market value for the raise.

In the mean time I got an offer for 50% more than what I'm making now. I'm heading to him today with my research in writing. Either way I'm getting that raise!

Hello,
I just quit my job at a big market research company. It was disturbing how much processes there depended on excel and obscure visual basic scripts.

They load data from a database, do typical database tasks with excel and upload it back into the database.

PhDs run complex statical computations through an excel interface that passes the request to R.

Instead of an hour Python they execute stupid tasks with excel by hand. Day after day, month after month.

WHY? My colleagues were not dumb but instead of learning SQL and some python they build insane excel tables.

Maybe it's time pressure. But this excel insanity costs much more time in the end.

It's been a while DevRant!

Straight back into it with a rant that no doubt many of us have experienced.

I've been in my current job for a year and a half & accepted the role on lower pay than I normally would as it's in my home town, and jobs in development are scarce.

My background is in Full Stack Development & have a wealth of AWS experience, secure SaaS stacks etc.

My current role is a PHP Systems Developer, a step down from a senior role I was in, but a much bigger company, closer to home, with seemingly a lot more career progression.

My job role/descriptions states the following as desired:

PHP, T-SQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, XML

I am also well versed in various JS frameworks, PHP Frameworks, JAVA, C# as well as other things such as:

Xamarin, Unity3D, Vue, React, Ionic, S3, Cognito, ECS, EBS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB etc etc.

A couple of months in, I took on all of the external web sites/apps, which historically sit with our Marketing department.

This was all over the place, and I brought it into some sort of control. The previous marketing developer hadn't left and AWS access key, so our GitLabs instance was buggered... that's one example of many many many that I had to work out and piece together, above and beyond my job role.

Done with a smile.

Did a handover to the new Marketing Dev, who still avoid certain work, meaning it gets put onto me. I have had a many a conversation with my line manager about how this is above and beyond what I was hired for and he agrees.

For the last 9 months, I have been working on a JAVA application with ML on the back end, completely separate from what the colleagues in my team do daily (tickets, reports, BI, MI etc.) and in a multi-threaded languages doing much more complicated work.

This is a prototype, been in development for 2 years before I go my hands on it. I needed to redo the entire UI, as well as add in soo many new features it was untrue (in 2 years there was no proper requirements gathering).

I was tasked initially with optimising the original code which utilised a single model & controller :o then after the first discussion with the product owner, it was clear they wanted a lot more features adding in, and that no requirement gathering had every been done effectively.

Throughout the last 9 month, arbitrary deadlines have been set, and I have pulled out all the stops, often doing work in my own time without compensation to meet deadlines set by our director (who is under the C-Suite, CEO, CTO etc.)

During this time, it became apparent that they want to take this product to market, and make it as a SaaS solution, so, given my experience, I was excited for this, and have developed quite a robust but high level view of the infrastructure we need, the Lambda / serverless functions/services we would want to set up, how we would use an API gateway and Cognito with custom claims etc etc etc.

Tomorrow, I go to London to speak with a major cloud company (one of the big ones) to discuss potential approaches & ways to stream the data we require etc.

I love this type of work, however, it is 100% so far above my current job role, and the current level (junior/mid level PHP dev at best) of pay we are given is no where near suitable for what I am doing, and have been doing for all this time, proven, consistent work.

Every conversation I have had with my line manager he tells me how I'm his best employee and how he doesn't want to lose me, and how I am worth the pay rise, (carrot dangling maybe?).

Generally I do believe him, as I too have lived in the culture of this company and there is ALOT of technical debt. Especially so with our Director who has no technical background at all.

Appraisal/review time comes around, I put in a request for a pay rise, along with market rates, lots of details, rates sources from multiple places.

As well that, I also had a job offer, and I rejected it despite it being on a lot more money for the same role as my job description (I rejected due to certain things that didn't sit well with me during the interview).

I used this in my review, and stated I had already rejected it as this is where I want to be, but wanted to use this offer as part of my research for market rates for the role I am employed to do, not the one I am doing.

My pay rise, which was only a small one really (5k, we bring in millions) to bring me in line with what is more suitable for my skills in the job I was employed to do alone.

This was rejected due to a period of sickness, despite, having made up ALL that time without compensation as mentioned.

I'm now unsure what to do, as this was rejected by my director, after my line manager agreed it, before it got to the COO etc.

Even though he sits behind me, sees all the work I put in, creates the arbitrary deadlines that I do work without compensation for, because I was sick, I'm not allowed a pay rise (doctors notes etc supplied).

What would you do in this situation?

You had two additional weeks to improve your project.

You could research different marketing strategies to increase revenue. You could add some new features to attract more users and ensure your existing users are satisfied. Finally, you could optimize performance to make your UI quicker.

But you’ve chosen to write some unit tests. Now that two weeks are gone, you got no new features, no performance improvements and no new marketing strategies while your competitors got them all.

Tests caught obvious bugs that can even be caught by static typing, but you by definition couldn’t write tests that’ll catch unpredictable bugs, so they are still present.

After six months you realize you have to rewrite a major part of your project because your project (surprise-surprise) has to chase market needs to stay relevant. Your tests are thrown into trash along with your old code.

“Having trouble with code quality? Write a lot of tests. And I mean a *lot*. Test every file in isolation. Mock as many imports as possible.

When you're done, your code will still be bad, but now your tests will make sure it's impossible to improve anything in any meaningful way.”

"The designer is not always right. The researcher is not always wrong. Profit is not always the motive; market research, whatever its outcome, should never be used as a good excuse for bad design – in the same sense that good design should never be used to promote a bad product." - Paul Rand

I was on glassdoor today, and a survey came up. The survey looks like market research for a product that sounds like it will be exactly like one of my side projects... Deciding if it's worth scrambling to beat them to market with what's barely a MVP and no marketing resources, or just chalking it up as fun and good experience.

Been working in market research for the past year and a half while doing a part time masters in business.

I officially quit in a week and will be a full time student and reviving my dormant programming skills.

Gone are the days of colleagues asking why their pirated Microsoft office crashes on then 8 year old laptop. No longer will I be subjected to attending client meetings where my sole purpose is to ensure the projector is working as I am "good with that sorta thing".

Friday evening, I am free!!

Apple users, would you ever ditch their products? And assuming u can drive, would u buy their car?

Over the last few weeks, I've containerised the last of our "legacy" stacks, put together a working proof of concept in a mixture of DynamoDB and K8s (i.e. no servers to maintain directly), passing all our integration tests for said stack, and performed a full cost analysis with current & predicted traffic to demonstrate long term server costs can be less than half of what they are now on standard pricing (even less with reserved pricing). Documented all the above, pulled in the relevant higher ups to discuss further resources moving forward, etc. That as well as dealing with the normal day to day crud of batting the support department out the way (no, the reason Bob's API call isn't working is because he's using his password as the API key, that's not a bug, etc. etc.) and telling the sales department that no, we can't bolt a feature on by tomorrow that lets users log in via facial recognition, and that'd be a stupid idea anyway. Oh, and tracking down / fixing a particularly nasty but weird occasional bug we were getting (race hazards, gotta love 'em.)

Pretty pleased with that work, but hey, that's just my normal job - I enjoy it, and I like to think I do good work.

In the same timeframe, the other senior dev & de-facto lead when I'm not around, has... "researched" a single other authentication API we were considering using, and come to the conclusion that he doesn't want to use it, as it's a bit tricky. Meanwhile passed all the support stuff and dev stuff onto others, as he's been very busy with the above.

His full research amounts to a paragraph which, in summary, says "I'm not sure about this OAuth thing they mention."

Ok, fine, he works slowly, but whatever, not my problem. Recently however, I learn that he's paid *more than I am*. I mean... I'm not paid poorly, if anything rather above market rate for the area, so it's not like I could easily find more money elsewhere - but damn, that's galling all the same.

Alright, my very first post here was about this project and I am thinking it out loud again.

I see a problem and I am struggling to find a solution.

Now what I am thinking of is to articulate the problem well and state WHY I believe it needs to be solved. There are some reasons which must be presented in a capitalist way.

Furthermore, I am thinking of doing a market research to understand various demographics, validate the idea, and figure out the product-market fit.

Now, this qualitative research and quantitative data will help me decide whether it is worth putting in the efforts to solve the problem or not.

And since, we have an MVP already (funnily yes, we built it before all of the above), that will help me validate the tangible solution.

Once we get a confidence boost, then it will be time to get that single transaction which has net positive cash flow.

Start scaling to 'next billion users', so a billion transaction with net positive cash flow.

I won't be branching out into multiple verticals before be able to sustainably scale the core USP.

And while the second half sounds like, 'I have a million dollar idea', I am trying to be more and more realistic and rationale instead of falling in love with my idea.

I don't even have an idea (read solution) to fall in love with. Rather I have a problem that is bothering me.

So, yes, I am continuing this journey to solve the problem which started in second year of my hostel room and has evolved over 10 years.

This is a part rant-part question.
So a little backstory first:
I work in a small company (5 including me) which is mostly into consultation (we have many tech partners where we either resell their products or if there is a requirement from one of our clients, we get our partners to develop it for them and fulfill the client requirements) so as you can see there is a lot of external dependencies. I act as a one-hat-fits-all tech guy, handling the company websites, social media channels, technical documentation, tech support, quicks POCs (so anything to do with anything technical, I handle them). I am a bit fed up now, since the CEO expects me to do some absurd shit (and sometimes micro manages me, like WTF I am the only one who works there with 100% commitment) and expects me to deliver them by yesterday.

So anyway long story short, our CEO finally had the brains to understand that we should start having our own product (which i had been subtly suggesting him to do for a while now!).

Now he came up with a fairly workable concept that would have good market reach (i atleast give him credits for that) and he wanted me to suggest the best way to move forward (from a both business and technical point of view). The concept is to have an auction-based platform for users to buy everyday products.

I suggested we build a web app as opposed to a mobile one (which is obvious, since i didnt want to develop a seperate website and a mobile app, and anyway just because we can doesnt mean we have to make a mobile app for everything), and recommended the Node/react based JS tech stack to build it.

At first he wanted me to single handedly build the whole platform within a month, I almost flipped (but me being me) then somehow calmed down and finally was able to explain him how complicated it was to single-handedly build a platform of such complexity (especially given my limited experience; did I mention that this is my first job and I am still in college, yeah!!) and convinced him to get an experienced back-end dev and another dev to help me with it.

Now comes the problem, I was to prepare a scope document outlining all the business and technical requirements of the project along with a tentative cost, which was fairly straightforward. I am currently stuck at deciding the server requirements and the system architecture for the proposed solution (I am thinking of either going with AWS - which looks a bit complicated to setup - or go with either Digital Ocean or Heroku):

I have assumed that at peak times we would have around 500-1000 users concurrently

And a daily userbase of 1000 users (atleast for the first few months of the platform running)

What would be the best way forward guys?

I did some extensive (i mean i read through some medium blogs! and aws documentation) research and put together the following specs (if we are going through AWS):

One AWS t3.medium ec2 instance for the node server (two if we want High Availability by coupling with the AWS load balancer and Elastic Beanstalk)

The db.t3.small postgres database

The S3 Storage bucket (100gb) for the React Front end hosting

AWS SNS for email/sms OTP and notification

And AWS CloudMonitor for logging amd monitoring.

Am I speculating the requirements properly, where have I missed??

Can u guys suggest what is the best specification for such a requirement (how do you guys decide what plan to go with)?

Any suggestions, corrections, advices are welcome

Fucking hell. So, I had an interview with market research company and in said interview I got told to bring my passport to my first shift training and it was ok if it was 5 years out of date. Additional info, they were supposed to call us on Thursday to book said shift and send us an email with a information pack. They never did.

Ok, day of shift comes along. After I booked it because no one fucking bothered to call any of us. Email never arrived but whatever. I go to the place and bring my 3 years out of date polish passport... Big fucking mistake. They don't seem to like polish passport seeing as how it's only the British ones that get the out of date is okay thing. So I'm sitting there still calm because sure, company policy, they have to do it. The training guy was nice and all, offered to get me to their office to speak to them about it. I accept and off we go.

At the office, I basically get the information that it's only British passports that get it and I basically can't use anything else as proof of ID, which is funny seeing as I have a polish identity card that I can leave and enter the country on within the EU. I suppose I'm going to try looking for a job that doesn't require passports for now and if I find a good one then they can go get fucked by a bull for all I care.

In conclusion, I get to wait till I'm 18 (thankfully only a month) to apply for a new passport in the local polish consulate. Brilliant. All thanks to some cunt that decided they require fucking passports with such beautiful (note the sarcasm) rules. The fucktards.

Hoping the apocalypse comes early for these cocksuckers,
BadFox

Well here's a story for you. I can't work on my game till the developer of a package I use updates his package. I can't research how to add the newer features I want to add till I know what the base code is gunna look like. I can't work on my second game idea because unreal engine has a major bug since version 4.15 that is crippling the performance of what I want to do. I can't work any assets for that game till I know what performance is gunna be like after the fix is implemented. It's now version 4.17 almost 4.18 and it might get pushed till version 4.19. I need to work on something like right now because my game studio is otherwise just sitting. It is a VR / AR only studio and there is no real direction to move in at the moment till somebody other than me gets their collective shit together.

I need something fairly "quick" but still fun to play to work on so I can sell sell sell. No idea wtf it's gunna be though. The steam market place is so full of garbage that I really don't want to contribute to that with more garbage. I also don't know anyone I can collaborate with to make something interesting.

WHAT DO I DO?

Does me spending hours on here count as market research/productive time?

On top of what others have said, like the interview questions to ask, etc, do your own research too, not just on the company/companies you're applying for, but also on the industry as a whole and the average salary of that position in your country.

This will help get a better idea of when you're getting ripped off, especially for those who are just entering the job market.

Do any of you ever work in cafes or hotel lobbies? What do you feel such a place should at least have if so? Consider this a market research question :)

Assuming that the spirit of the question means that you are required to actually build something instead of sitting around doing nothing as a requirement for your impossible superpower, I would, in order:

1. Develop hundreds of shitty mobile games and flood the Android market, making millions of dollars.

2. Use this to fund competitors to every major tech company in the world, making billions of dollars.

3. Dump a very large portion of this money into a research group for a complete anti-aging treatement.

4. Sell this only to the top bidders. Make more billions.

5. Use the money to colonize another planet, perhaps in another solar system entirely. Create a transport line that provides free doses of aforementioned treatement. Bring only scientists and their families. Create a utopia from scratch.

6. Develop machines to automate all aspects of life. Live in utopia with no need for money. Allow everyone to persue passions with unlimited time and nearly unlimited resources.

so I offered to help a guy with his startup idea which is in the making for a year at least. (A telemetry data collection device, mind you). It's an unpaid internship with no strings attached, no contract, mind you.

I am nowhere near the programming pro like most of you guys here, so that's what I want to focus on improving.

First thing he tells me to do is a market research on competitors.... I thought I left that bullshit behind when I left business school..

If I want to work without getting paid, I'd rather stay at home and learn c++ and opencl, and work on the MSc thesis full time, thanks.

Do you think it's the right thing to do or should I give it time?

So, what's the process for starting to create your idea? I have one, I've given it a minimal amount of thought, a very high level overview, the purpose and some features that I want. Probably just a free service because it's (probably) not anything too serious. So what now? Market research or just start typing? Planning architecture? This is my first time that I've had an idea I think is worth pursuing. What have you all done?