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Search - "profit model"
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Fuck startups.
Back when I was an wee lad I interviewed for an startup, not knowing that startups are not real companies. The scumbag interviewer, who was also the owner of the outfit, asked me what I was looking in a company. I said "fair wages, a non-antagonic environment and projects with real roadmaps".
He asked me to elaborate. I said, "You know, if today your product is a sales platform, I do not want to come into work next week and discover it is now an air travel tickets marketplace, or come back the very next day and discover it is now an automated pizza factory, or in the next day and it is now a crypto exchange..."
The scumbag looked PISSED. "Sorry, but we are looking for someone who likes the challenges of a dynamic environment (read: we do not have a business model and we hate the very idea of trying to make money out of our company), and you do not fit the profile"
Startups are not real companies, i.e. they do not systematically charge money in exchange for goods or services in amounts that exceed the cost of providing said goods or services. Most startups are just tax fronts for money laundering schemes. The rest are just playthings for rich assholes who can't get a real output-producing job. Those two categories are not mutually exclusive.
Take Facebook, for example. The poster child of startups. The Zucker that owns it just announced they are setting impossible performance targets on purpose, not even attempting to hide the fact that it is just a way to lay off large quantities of employees without using the words "massive lay offs". Companies, real thin-margin, lots-of-regulation profit-driven companies do not do that. They are not some sort of "capitalist woke", real CEOs just know that if their companies largely miss performance targets on their tenure, purposely or not, next it will be their neck on the chopping block. Because they can be fired if the KPI charts say they suck. But the Zucker cannot be fired, not even after commanding their beanbag and tap beer offices to be heated exclusively by burning hundred dollar bills.
So the Zucker is not interested in performance. Not even in lay offs as expense cutting measures - investors are an infinite source of free money for startups. The Zucker just wants to project power, especially now that engineers are not so confident in the stability of they high-paying jobs.
So are irrelevant 500-souls-or-less self-aggrandizing startups. Their owners are there because it is in vogue to have a startup or ten. And will have that startup pivot to whatever sounds fancy that season. After all, only poor people care about things like EBITDA and profit margins repeatability - A.K.A. "getting more money".
Fuck startups.13 -
Company top execs: "We need to optimize our costs and reduce our expenditure by x€ to keep the profit margin at acceptable levels for the shareholders"
YOU ARE PUSHING OUT SHIT PRODUCTS DAY IN AND DAY OUT THAT YOU FUCKING SUITS THINK WILL BE THE NEXT BIG THING BUT NOONE REALLY WANTS OR NEEDS. WE ALREADY HAVE A TON OF THOSE BORN-DEAD SHITCAKES HANGING AROUND ABD NEW ONES ARE ALREADY BEING PREPARED FOR LAUNCH.
"OPTIMIZE COSTS"? HOW ABOUT YOU STOP PRODUCING SHIT AND STICK TO YOUR FUCKING CORE BUSINESS MODEL!!!
"OPTIMIZE COSTS"? WE HAVE A ZERG OF OLD FUCKS, WHO ARE STILL WAITING FOR THE FUCKING SMS TO START THE NEXT TECH REVOLUTION, ON OUR PAYROLL. ALL THEY FUCKING DO IS PLAY SUDOKU IN THE KITCHEN AND DISCUSS TECHNIQUES ON HOW TO RAISE GOATS!!!
"NO MONEY TO GIVE A PAYRISE TO DEVELOPERS"? WHY DONT YOU JUST FUCKING GET RID OF THE USELESS DUDES BASICALLY DOING THEIR TENURE AND CLOSE SOME OF THESE FUCKTARDED PRODUCTS THAT 4 PEOPLE OUTSIDE OF THE FUCKING COMPANY USE BUT NEED A TEAM OF FUCKING 20 TO MAINTAIN! NO!!! THEY WILL NOT BE THE NEXT BIG THING! NO!!! ANYTHING YOU SHITCAKES WHO THINK MOBILE APPS IS THE "NEW EMERGING MARKET" WILL EVER CREATE THE NEXT FUCKING BIG THING!!!!!
STICK TO YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS AND STOP CREATING USELESS SHIT THATS MAADE BY FUCKING USELESS PEOPLE!!!!
FUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!! -
Hot Take:
Subscription based products are exactly why we don't see major break-throughs in software anymore.
*** I am warning you, don't mention AI in the comments, I am gonna fucking lose it. ***
Tell me one thing, If you spent thousands to create a product that you now have a good subscriber base on, why would you invest money into making another? Why wouldn't you just consider improving the product at hand and selling it to more people to create additional profit?
In the 90s we used to get any software on CDs/DVDs and you actually got to own it. Meaning that the company can only take money from you ONCE and never again (almost). This also meant that the companies knew that soon they'd have to come up with something else that will make them money, thus them creating new software every couple or so years, some even creating ground-breaking software.
But then, there is thing called MONOPOLY.
We will never get another music app than Spotify or Apple music, because they are just too far ahead. They're built on subscription model.
You can probably think of more examples of great companies building great products and moving them to subscription model and therefore never creating another software, because frankly, why take the risk to lose money when you can gain more money by improving the product at hand?
We will never get the same frequency of good games coming to market from established companies like RockStar. Why should they bothered to make GTA 6 when they can sell millions of worth of Shark Cards every month and rake in the profits?
Subscriptions have totally killed off software creativity and motivation for devs/companies to create great software.17 -
I had the oppertunity to join a non profit organization to help them automate stuff instead of serving the army. One of their core applications got rewritten like a year ago from a terrible and very old Symfony stack to Laravel / React.
The guys who were in charge for the rewrite didn't really adapt the mindset of either MVC for Laravel nor the component idea behind React. There are a few controllers in the backend, but they sometimes have functions defined which would clearly belong in a model or service class. They rarely defined relationships on models, instead they're joining the tables together for the same effect. The frontend rendering mostly happens in for loops over the returned array from the API instead of breaking things down into little components. This ends in components which have sometimes over 1000 lines with super-nested logic in it.
But I did find my favorite piece of code today in of the controllers. Some many questions ...6 -
Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:
So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.
Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.
Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.
Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂 -
I don't care about market cap. Stick your hype-driven business practices up your ass. Infinite growth doesn't exist. I won't read your fucking books and attend your fucking bootcamps and MBAs. You don't have a business model. Selling data is not a business model. Fuck your quick-flip venture capital schemes, and especially fuck your “ethics”.
I will be the first alt-tech CEO. I only care about revenue. The real money, not capitalization bubble vaporware. You don't need a huge fleet of engineers if you're smart about your technology, know how to do architecture, and you're not a feature creep. You don't need venture capital if you don't need a huge fleet of engineers. You don't need to sell data if you don't need venture capital. See? See the pattern here?
My experience allows me to build products on entirely my own. I am fully aware of the limitations of being alone, and they only inspire lean thinking and great architectural decisions. If you know throwing capacity at a problem is not an option, you start thinking differently. And if you don't need to hire anyone, it is very easy to turn a profit and make it sustainable.
If you don't follow the path of tech vaporware, you won't have the problems of tech vaporware, namely distrust of your user base, shitty updates that break everything, and of course “oops, they raised capital, time to leave before things go south”.
A friend of mine went the path I'm talking about, developed a product over the course of four years all alone, reached $10k MRR and sold for $0.8M. But I won't sell. I only care about revenue. If I get to $10k MRR, I will most likely stop doing new features and focus on fixing all the bugs there are and improving performance. This and security patches. Maybe an occasional facelift. That's it. Some products are valued because they don't change, like Sublime Text. The utility tool you can rely on. This is my scheme, this is what I want to do in life. A best-kept secret.
Imagine 100 million users that hate my product but use it because there are no alternatives, 100 people in data enrichment department alone, a billion dollars of evaluation (without being profitable), 10 million twitter followers, and ten VC firms telling me what to do and what data to sell.
Fuck that. I'd rather have one thousand loyal customers and $10k MRR. I'm different, some call it a mental illness, but the bottom line is, my goals are beyond their understanding. They call me crazy. I won't say it was never about the money, of course it was, but inflating your evaluation is not “money”. But the only thing they have is their terrible hustle culture lives and some VC street wisdom, meanwhile I HAVE products, it is on record on my PH. I have POTDs, I have a fucking Golden Kitty nomination on health and fitness for a product I made in one day. Fuck you.7 -
META-LUCK: A Pseudo-Ontology Of An Authentic Future
* * *
I think in the not-to-distant future we will abandon the idea of authenticity (messaging, corporate responsibility, ethos) in favor of other factors, such as cost. We won't abandon it and replace it with fakeness, so much as realize
that we don't, as a society favor it at all, not in the absolute sense, nor in the relative sense like in relation to things like cost.
We will either abandon authenticity entirely, or alternatively, transition to a world where authenticity is the highest valued quality, being adjacent to truth.
Heres why. Authenticity, like all social qualities, can be 1. mimicked, 2. simulated,
or 3. emulated.
In the first case, a corporation, product, leader, organization, or other, apes authenticity simply by its knowable, external features. It mimics the sounds, like a jungle bird copying a jack hammer to scare away predators or attract mates.
There is no understanding, let alone model, external or internal. The successful mimic
is little more than a lifeless, unthinking puppet.
In the second case, the attempted authentic simulates authenticity: That is, an external
model is formed, or pattern, that is predictable, and archetypal. It may have an internal
model even, a set of policies and processes for deciding the external-facing behavior.
But these policies and internal processes and models are all strictly outward facing. It is purely pathological in its goal, desiring only at minimum to achieve *externally attribute* authenticity (public opinion) rather than those internal changes that generate the true perception of the public--a perception not of surface behaviors and shrewd calculating policies and processes, but as a quality of authenticity for its own sake. This is in some sense the difference between the mundane and the atavistic, that the benefit, while not definable strictly, is assumed as a 'matter of course', culturally, within the organization or individual or company. It is to say, a *quality* of the thing, that *generates* outputs of a certain character and nature, rather than a *goal* that is attained 'after-the-fact' by behaviors generated for *other* than being authentic.
Here we reach the limitation of definitions.
Finally, we arrive at the case of number three, the emulation. We have in part already described it, but lets try and summarize a bit.
The Authentic is an *originator* of behavior and outward appearances, being an internal quality of a person or organization. It originates behavior, rather than being the goal of behavior and outward appearances.
Its benefit is assumed, though not always nameable or definable, even though this sounds naive, superseding other factors like cost and profit. As such the authentic does not emerge in a cost-focused environment, not readily, not often, and not cheaply either.
It is in some sense an experimental state of being, of goal-seeking only after-the-fact of "being true to ones origins" is established above and beyond those goals--setting and achieving only those goals which ultimately align with the origin and intent of the authentic.6 -
How does devrant make profit?
Are you, hexical labs, accepting donations, or what's the business model?4 -
So I get to work on building a client at work for industrial automation. I am building a mini hmi to show customers how our server works. The code uses opcua. The reason I am making a client is because all the opcua hmis on the market are really expensive. There is nothing less than $600. There are hmis for free out there, but none of them say they support opcua. opcua has become a major protocol in the industrial automation industry.
It took me about 2 days to gin together a client that is pretty much abstracted and will be easy to maintain. A lot of that was just learning the opcua library client code.
Now I want to create servers and clients geared toward home automation for fun and profit. I want to take sensor data from arduinos using a simple serial protocol like modbus or other protocols that are supported. Then have an opcua server that collects this data. Then finally have an opcua hmi that I develop talk to these servers. The security model is much better and would be compatible with other vendors clients/servers. I already have a game engine I want to use for the hmi portion. It has tons of widgets for displaying data, graphs, lists, text, etc. It does both 2d and 3d.
This sounds like a project that could really fun, meshes with my work learning, and provides value to people that want to automate their lives.
The other side effect is that the next time I go looking for a simple and cheap hmi that supports opcua, there will be one. -
I feel like IE is an example of a deep rooted demon beast that spawns fucktarded bloat transpilers like BABEL.
When companies try to invent their own wheels, or do their own thing is when the pits of developer hell start to spawn such fucking convoluted fucktarded bullshit.
Abstract to Design:
I'm trying to think of a world where things are standardized, as boring as it sounds... Imagine if companies weren't so fucktarded with greedy smoke and mirrors, and they all contributed to making a single product standardized and workable, and improve on that product... Like a physics "Standard model" but for each product invented.
But no... here we are... 20 million ways to accomplish one similar task, with 20 million different designs, with majority adhering to their own flaws... or planned obsolecence... 10 million booby traps of consumer remorse.
Why do we do this as a society just to make some bastard company's profit margin go up, so they can keep competing in the "free market" of fuck all fuckery?
I get it.. yea... innovation... sure..
but sometimes innovation is just a means to and end of sanity, especially when they are proprietary, and especially when that proprietary shit turns to, well... shit!
In a perfect world, things will be designed open-sourced, compatible, and improved upon without "breaking" changes... but this is virtually impossible without standardization of the VERY fundamental components. But then those components can be improved, and might be smaller/lighter/more efficient by design, and simply wont work with the old versions without drastic "TRANSPILATION"
I suppose this is the way it is always going to be... Neverending stream of design "improvements". I suppose being a developer in todays world is a bittersweet existence... unless you're just trying to make ends meet... in that case. I think I might be in hell.
Take a look at web-dev today with all the "improvements" ... it's literally turned into a jungle of FUCK MY LIFE. A giant dick waiving contest with all these dicks colliding against each other in cluster fuck bombardment.
God help us all.... and now back to coding.4