App Developers, It's Time For a Reality Check

Nerval's Lobster writes: "An article in the Harvard Business Review does its best to punch a small hole in the startup-hype balloon. 'Encouraging kids to blow off schoolwork to write apps, or skip college to become entrepreneurs, is like advising them to take their college money and invest it in PowerBall,' Jerry Davis, Wilbur K. Pierpont professor of management at the Ross School of Business and the editor of Administrative Science Quarterly, wrote in that column. 'A few may win big; many or most will end up living with their moms.' Whether or not the unfortunate developer ends up back in the childhood bedroom, it's true that, with millions of apps available across all mobile platforms, it's increasingly difficult for independent developers to stand out. Compounding the problem, some of the hottest companies out there for developers and programmers don't have nearly enough job openings to absorb the flood of graduates from the world's universities. So what's a developer to do? Continue to plow forward, with adjusted expectations: the prospect of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg is just too tantalizing for many people to pass up, even if the chances of wild success are smaller than anyone rational would like to admit."

Comments

Web Bubble 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Complete with outrageous billionaire dropout success stories, exploited immigrant workers, extreme gentrification, and a legion of Johnny-Come-Latelies graduating just in time to see the whole thing collapse like a house of cards.

Re:Web Bubble 2.0

[poached]

I just checked - NASDAQ is up significantly over DOW and S&P500, just like the dot-com days (98-99), whereas for the most part between 2001 and 2008, NASDAQ was on the same level as the other indices.

Google Finance

Re:Web Bubble 2.0

[Trax3001BBS]

I just checked - NASDAQ is up significantly over DOW and S&P500, just like the dot-com days (98-99)

Was at a kids birthday party, his Dad and I were talking when he says there's a lot of money to be made on the Internet, and I said no there's not. He comes back with all the money being spent by companies for these web sites, I said it's all speculation.

The next week the bubble burst.

19 billion for a web site and 2 billion for hardware, it's not making sense; other than a grab for everything while they can, and hope for the best.

Re:Web Bubble 2.0

[Opportunist]

Me and a few friends were grabbing back then. We were writing software for those "big startups", launched by MBAs without a hint of what the internet actually is but with THE idea that would allow them to land big bucks.

I bought a house, a friend bought a few cars and the other one now owns part of a REAL company. The "big startups" that we worked for don't exist anymore. None of them. And no, not because our software was bad, quite the opposite, we are pretty good at what we're doing.

But it might explain why I hold people waving an MBA in front of my nose and thinking that it would impress me in very, very low esteem. Call it ... experience.

Re:Web Bubble 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Weeeeellll,
It was $4 billion for what'sapp (but probably just for the data on their users) and $400 million for Oculus. The rest of those acquisitions were in Facebook funnymoney stock which is just inflated bullshit lies.

Viewpoint

[suso]

Is there a startup-hype balloon? I hadn't noticed. I'm too busy dealing with the security holes of apps and services written by high school and college drop outs.

Re:Viewpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny, because I'm constantly fixing security holes left by university graduates and I only have a grade 12 education on paper.

Re:Viewpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't confuse education with credentials. You're educated, but not credentialed. They're credentialed, but may not be educated. Self education is the best education.

Re:Viewpoint

[nomad63]

Since you are so offended by the response, I am assuming you are in the non-college-grad crowd. Together with not being a guarantee for a grad to be better than everyone else, there is a very good chance that, it can teach the principals of critical thinking, which makes you a better analytical person in turn. And I have to agree with the post you are responding to, at a certain level. Not necessarily the college dropouts or high school students but a whole myriad of people who think they can code, but in reality can't, are the reason why there is a profession called Information Systems Security. Why, because those who can't code but still do, open up the floodgates to all the malfeasance of the internet. Who do you think coded the application, which lead to stealing of millions of credit card numbers from Target stores, not too long ago ? I bet dollars to your pocket lint, it was a so-called programmer, who had no business coding the leaky application. Most probably a "java guru" working for equivalent of $5/hr in an office building, in some sordid corner of Mumbai, India, who has a shiny CS diploma hanging on the wall behind him or her.

Re:Viewpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't go to university to learn how things are done. You go to university so you can understand why they're done.

Never confuse an engineer with a tradesman.

Re:Viewpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't confuse education with credentials. You're educated, but not credentialed. They're credentialed, but may not be educated. Self education is the best education.

Not in the eyes of HR. Papers please. None? Step into File 13 please. Next.

Re:Viewpoint

[narcc]

Keep telling yourself that if it makes you feel better.

Poor autodidacts, they're so delusional.

Re:Viewpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK you go to university to get a "piece of paper", so that you can more easily get a job, get paid and if you have any brains and initiative you learn how and why things are done along the way.

Of course if you're going to a uni like Harvard, then that's different - you go to such universities to meet people with connections.

Re:Viewpoint

[TheRaven64]

You go to university to understand the depths of your ignorance. It's then up to you whether you just get the piece of paper, or whether you do something to correct this situation. University won't teach you everything you need to know, but it will tell you what some of the things that you don't realise that you should know are.

Re:Viewpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's safe to say we've all heard of the dropout (high school or higher ed, doesn't matter) that went on to achieve great success and unheard of riches in a field that we had been told as children was only for university graduates.

But we also have to admit they are rare. We don't hear about every other dropout that didn't achieve that level of success and struggles to make ends meet month after month. There's too many of them!

University education is the safe route. It's low risk for the would-be employee...and for the would-be employer. More people are closer to the "average" than they are to the "excellent" on whatever spectrum of brilliance and capacity we put ourselves on.

So if you're taking the "dropout" route, know that it's the "high risk, high gain" option....but people seem to forget the "risk" part of the equation. I would also place the autodidacts in this category, simply because the lack of guidance, it's quite easy to steer of the "right" path; like that girl that kept defending her stance on the dangers of Dihydrogen Monoxide because that's what her internet research had shown, and she firmly believed to be right.

Re:Viewpoint

[Opportunist]

Personally, I don't give a shit how my team dresses (well, as long as they DO dress...). But then again, I only have to manage less than a dozen people.

I honestly have to wonder why I should care how they dress. What I care about is their work.

Re:Viewpoint

[Opportunist]

Yes, and some of the worst. Just like some of the best and some of the worst software has been written by people holding a doctorate degree in IT.

What does it tell us? That it's not the degree that writes software, it's the programmer.

Re:Viewpoint

[Opportunist]

Well, looking back at my university years, it was amazing just what people expected to be taught. The first shock, I think, was that university is NOT going to teach you how to code. You're expected to know that if you want to STUDY computer science.

I can't help but think it's like someone wanting to study English and realizing in horror that he's expected to know how to read and write in that language.

Re:Viewpoint

[AmiMoJo]

Writing code is one thing, software engineering is quite another. It's like the difference between being literate enough to write a letter to a friend and being able to construct a series of classic novels. For a computer science course the former is enough.

Re:Viewpoint

[drinkypoo]

I can't help but think it's like someone wanting to study English and realizing in horror that he's expected to know how to read and write in that language.

That doesn't make any sense at all, because a university will teach you how to read and write English. If you say they won't teach you how to code, that's a failing of the university and you're making elitist excuses for it based on a difference which doesn't exist.

Re:Viewpoint

[Wycliffe]

I'm a college grad but some of the best programmers and employees I've hired have not had a degree but most of them were still
working on one. I very much believe in the saying: "college doesn't make people successful but successful people go to college".
The people who are going to be successful would most likely have been successful regardless of whether they went to college or not.
Most of the billionaires are "college dropouts". It's not that they didn't go to college, it's that success caught up to them too fast so that
they were too busy being successful to bother with college. If that is you, then great, otherwise, you should continue to go to college
until you are successful. One of the things that a college degree shows is that you have the patience and dedication to follow
something through to completion. That's probably the number one problem I've found with hiring people without degrees. They are
typically alot less reliable than the ones with degrees but as far as their technical skills I've never had a problem.

Re:Viewpoint

[shmlco]

If you go to a university in the US you're already expected to be able to read and write English. Now, some classes may be able to expand on those skills, but you should already have the fundamentals.

Re:Viewpoint

[shmlco]

Seems to me that most of the rants for or against college education tell us more about the personal biases of those doing the ranting...

Re:Viewpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's about power, with your nick, you probably aren't completely clueless about it.

Re:Viewpoint

[Opportunist]

Personally, I have a bias against people who consider themselves somehow more important because of some kind of prefix to their name. So I have one. So what? Means jack, to be blunt. Essentially it means that you found a topic that has not been done to death in your field of study, that's not SO obscure that you can't find source material either, and that you still found some way to fill a couple dozen pages with it.

A thesis used to be something that should enrich and inspire your field of study, that should add to the pool of wisdom and increase the wealth of knowledge. In many fields, though, it has turned into some way to pump out advanced degrees. There is simply not enough new to study for all the potential doctorates out there, so you end up with a lot of things where you first wonder what the hell this should be, then you wonder if you really read what you're reading and eventually you end up either laughing or crying because you're eventually certain that you are.

Re:Viewpoint

[BasilBrush]

Is auto-didacticism a dirty word where you come from?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Re:Viewpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

yes but it makes you go blind

So make your own shitty app.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to be part of some piece of shit company.

Anyway, I thought we needed H1-B's because there weren't enough people to fill all these jobs. What, now suddenly all the jobs are filled?

Re:So make your own shitty app.

[Gr8Apes]

I thought we needed H1-B's because there weren't enough people to fill all these jobs. What, now suddenly all the jobs are filled?

With H1Bs.

Re:So make your own shitty app.

[tepples]

You don't need to be part of some [...] company.

You do if you're trying to make an app for a Sony or Nintendo platform.

Re:So make your own shitty app.

[Anonymous Coward]

there aren't enough people to fill the jobs because they all went off to start their own companies in the hopes of becoming filthy rich either through a successful product or being bought out by the big leagues.

Re:So make your own shitty app.

[tfranzese]

I'm starting to think you're a shill. You listed the two most open console platforms to independent developers without the need for a publisher, but left out the one that is the absolute pits to self-publish on (Microsoft).

Re:So make your own shitty app.

[Anonymous Coward]

He's a proliferate troll, not a shill. Just check his history.

Where does article say "not enough openings"?

[SuperKendall]

The article that was supposed to illustrate there are "not enough job openings" was just about two fairly successful kids developing, and an overall question if college is as good an idea as it used to be.

Lots of companies still seem to be strongly hiring developers, and I don't see a "flood" of them coming from anywhere. Why would you claim it's a bad idea to get into programming now? Especially if you find a CS degree somewhere you will be ahead of a lot of people in terms of building better software on WHATEVER platform you work with - web or mobile or desktop or anything.

Re:Where does article say "not enough openings"?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article was written by an "Ivory Tower" professor who never actually did anything in the real world.

Re:Where does article say "not enough openings"?

[mlts]

There are jobs out there. However, the days of 2008 where one could put out 99 cent fart apps and rake in the cash, or the days of 2012 where one could put out a free-to-play, pay-to-win game are now behind us. The market is saturated.

But there are markets where things are not like that and niches can be made. Embedded programming will be work that requires a real expert, just because each application (and hardware device) is different. A microcontroller for a RV's A/C will require a completely different set of code than a microcontroller that monitors a building's HVAC system at multiple locations. One size does not fit all in the embedded arena, so "commodity development" (i.e. offshoring) will be more expensive than hiring people domestically since there is new ground to be broken.

I'm sure the next bubble is going to be security. SSL/TLS need to be reworked to support multiple root CAs in case one is compromised. That way, if two CAs have no clue about a cert, but one CA vets it, this can raise a red flag. Security isn't something one can do on the cheap. This needs real expertise, and more than just reading "The Cookoo's Egg" and calling oneself a "security professional". White/black hat hacking is going to be an important part of things, and this, yet again, isn't something that comes cheap.

Then there is the fact that there are international issues now. Just last year, people were content to get all their hardware from one country, their software from another. Now, nations want to pack their own parachutes and develop their security in house, and not rely solely on the word of other countries that the smartphones or other items don't come bristling with backdoors and kill switches. So, there will be duplication of effort that wasn't around just a year ago.

On this note, governments will become a bigger client for developers. They will want their own infrastructures, social media sites, and many other items. This will be where the money lies for upcoming companies because governments have deep pockets, and the ability to work on things even if not an immediate profit is obtainable.

Then there are items to be addressed that would make money, infrastructure wise. Here in the US, there is plenty of LAN bandwidth to go around. WAN bandwidth is expensive. Someone making an infrared laser routing system and other means (microwave relay) to create a mesh network would likely make a lot of money, especially if it has innate encryption that consists of more than "trust us, the glowing 'it is encrypted' LED ensures 100% security" flim-flam.

Finally, the model of advertising revenue is going to hit a wall pretty soon. Once ad-supported sites start selling to advertisers every click, mouse wiggle, and keyboard stroke that subscribers do, or even worse, demand intrusive spyware be installed on subscribers' machines, then there will be no more they can sell to the advertisers. Once that happens, the bubble will collapse. Who knows from there. "Free" E-mail may become a thing of the past, perhaps even Google or other search engine use would require micropayments.

All and all, there are still niches to be filled. One just can't follow the herd all day long and expect to be able to get to fresh grass.

Re:Where does article say "not enough openings"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn near every company I have worked for in the past 25 years has always been in need of good developers. This includes both experienced and even those just starting out. Each group requires separate evaluations but it is pretty easy to judge the value of both groups with the right questions. The experienced candidates usually fail due to overly rigid attitudes on what type of development environment or tool sets they will use. There is nothing worse than an experienced programmer who is wedded to a particular platform or architecture because they KNOW without a doubt any thing else is not worth their time. And those just starting out need to understand there is a whole lot more important things than just scripting languages required when building applications. If you really want a high paying job keep your C/C++ skills up to date because there is still a tremendous amount of work out there for people with this particular skillset. I have worked with excellent and very productive .NET and JAVA programmers who basically have no clue as to what their program is doing once it disappears into the runtime layer. There are a lot of applications that require programming against the actual OS and without people developing these type of applications those writing silly little apps would be out of work.

Re:Where does article say "not enough openings"?

[Sloppy]

[yeah, this is a digression]

SSL/TLS need to be reworked to support multiple root CAs in case one is compromised. That way, if two CAs have no clue about a cert, but one CA vets it, this can raise a red flag.

That's not how you do multiple CAs. You don't raise red flags; you abstain from raising green ones. Everything starts red by default. No CA (even the most hated and distrusted one) can ever possibly harm your estimation that a key is correct; they can simply fail to increase your estimate. Trust is somewhere between zero and one, but never less than zero. Even Cthulhu Hitler CA rates no less than 0.0.

Re:Where does article say "not enough openings"?

[mlts]

I stand corrected... Your model is far better. The intent was to give an example of what core protocols need to be improved to handle modern attacks.

Re:Where does article say "not enough openings"?

[0xdeadbeef]

However, the days of 2008 where one could put out 99 cent fart apps and rake in the cash, or the days of 2012 where one could put out a free-to-play, pay-to-win game are now behind us.

No more than a tiny fraction, perhaps a percent of a precent, of mobile developers were "raking in the cash" making novelty apps and pay to win games. The overwhelming majority of mobile developers had full time jobs writing software for established companies then, as they do now.

And it's funny that you mentioned embedded programming. Back in the PDA days it was considered embedded programming, so we'd hire anyone with embedded experience, whether it was microcontrollers, or set-top boxes, or cell phones, or what have you. It didn't really matter what you worked on, only that you knew how to write C code for a constrained environment and only thought about suicide when dealing with the overtly complicated toolchains.

Apple and Google made it too easy.

Re:Where does article say "not enough openings"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure how much there is left to develop in terms of new "rake-in-the-cash" platforms.
The equivalent in the late nineties was the multimedia CDs with one-shot games and utilities (before most of us were jaded with a previously owned stash of hardware, utilities, or downloads that now saturate the market).

They were little more than experimentation with sound and video technology in the part of inexperienced programmers. Whoever could not press their CDs was apparently doing shareware, or games sold levels in installments. For small utilities and apps VB was king.

I think wearable may have some shot at the next big tech cash cow, but there's no killer app yet that smartphones can't achieve if we allow for a bit of room. Seeing how flop-sy the idea of smartwatches and Glass look, we may have to wait until some country liberates Neural interfaces from labs into our living rooms. Seeing how strict the US FDA is with trial requirements, and how bad privacy trust got so quick, it'll NEVER be the US doing this. Good chance here for the EU or scruple-free (sadly) East to push its way into our visors.

Re:Where does article say "not enough openings"?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Different AC here.) I do remember that. Myst was one biggest names in the "multimedia" age around those times. Then came the "shovelware" games pushing the entire concept of a "multimedia CD" to a novelty that one could buy 8-10 CDs in a pack.

I agree with you. Wearable is where smartphones were in 2006, a niche technology. The US might be interested in the tech if Apple goes forward with it and gets people interested (thus clones come in to enter in on the low range of the market, similar to how the MP3 player market went.) No other company would be able to.

Another niche is going to be military and corrections. SCOTUS in the US has put the country and every single elected office up on the auction block (making the US the -only- country in the world where the government is controlled by foreign nationals without even trying to hide it.) Because campaign funding is everything, we will see a rise in private prisons and their needs (Check out Corrections Corporation of America... their stock looks like it is growing faster than Apple, even in Apple's heyday.) So, if one writes for corrections or internal security, it is a guaranteed job, and someone is going to do that work.

I would second the grandparent -- governments are starting to get paranoid again due to Russian aggression and Chinese cyber-trespass and state sponsored espionage. So, it is a matter of time before countries started having their own core Internet... We might even see multiple "internets", using IPv4, but each country using its own IP space and DNS the way they feel like... and it will be left to the peering companies how stuff is routed.

Re:Where does article say "not enough openings"?

[slashdot_commentator]

Yup. And it costs that Ph.D absolutely nothing to make generalizations using data which may be utterly invalid today, post 2006.

I believe the truth is somewhere between four results. Some people will go to college, and become financially successful. Some people today will try to complete their college degrees, in exchange for indentured servitude (to student debt) for most of their working lives. Some people won't go to college, strike it out on their own, and not be financially successful. A few people will skip college, strike it out on their own, and become financially successful. There is no real middle strategy; its just a matter of which choice you will make, and you will have to live with the result. My feeling is that you make the choice that best fits yourself, and have a strategy when it doesn't work out.

The only thing I'm pretty certain about: If you're poor, and can't get a subsidized ride into a very good four year college, you are definitely opting to be a wage slave if you take on a lot of student debt. Very few poor kids are going to take on debt in a profession like doctor or lawyer, and work his way out in his lifetime.

Re:Where does article say "not enough openings"?

[Opportunist]

Security is slowly getting saturated. Sadly, it gets saturated with people I would LOVE to just stuff into a giant cannon and shoot a few weeks from next Tuesday.

Various schools around here are pumping out "security engineers" like there's no tomorrow. Basically what you get is someone who holds a college degree and can spell ISO27001 without stumbling more than once. Don't expect him to have any kind of measurable realistic idea of what he learned for that, though. Or that he ever had anything but a theoretic approach to security. If you want to have a good laugh, just ask him how to implement it (the laughing part is where his security idea touches the employees).

Right now you can get a LOT of highly trained ivory tower idiots with lots and lots and lots of theoretic knowledge and very little, if any, idea how to get it down on the floor. If it didn't mean job security for the foreseeable future for me, I'd weep for security.

Re:Where does article say "not enough openings"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because unions were the only people that deserved to funnel 100's of millions of dollars into politics. yeah

Re:Where does article say "not enough openings"?

[dougg76]

You are right there are some applications that have to be coded "against the actual OS" but most of the work out there is just enterprize programming that is just a bunch of business logic. I just love how I run into places that hype up all this required CS knowledge and crazy interview algorithm questions, and the most challenging piece of code they excrete is regex... I honestly think we multiple types of programmers, and we should stop trying to put them all in the same bucket. Most programming now days is not rocket science and a lot of programmers need an ego check.

Re:Where does article say "not enough openings"?

[GrantRobertson]

I honestly think we multiple types of programmers, and we should stop trying to put them all in the same bucket. Most programming now days is not rocket science and a lot of programmers need an ego check.

Agreed. They don't call every job for people who make stuff out of wood "woodworker." There are framers and carpenters and cabinet makers and furniture builders...

We are lucky that we are still in the era when computer programming is new and the education system doesn't "get it" yet. In another generation or two, this will almost all be commodity work and programmers will be no more special than bookkeepers or plumbers or good cabinet makers. Sure, not everyone will know how to do it but how many programmers can fix their frikkin toilet, let alone plumb an entire house?

Not enough jobs? I thought not enough candidates!

[Anonymous Coward]

> Compounding the problem, some of the hottest companies out there for developers and programmers don't have nearly enough job openings to absorb the flood of graduates from the world's universities.

Wait a sec, they keep screaming that there arent't enough candidates to fill the spots. Something fishing is going on.

This completely disregards the educational value.

[Anonymous Coward]

College isn't the only place to learn things. Building stuff on your own teaches you stuff *faster* than a standard curriculum. You learn more there about business, development, marketing, etc. than a school could ever teach you.

Doing > listening.

That said, a formal education can compliment that self-taught knowledge nicely, but at the additional cost of time/money. This is every university's business model so obviously some guy looking at this as a "Powerball" and completely disregarding people becoming self taught is a fairly one-sided.

Why not do both and figure out what works best for you? It's better for these young people to try things on their own and THEN go to college so that they have more life experience.

There aren't enough jobs for the developers

[Anonymous Coward]

and there aren't enough developers for the jobs. There's always more money for the banks though.

Reality Check: Go for your dreams

[JoeyRox]

Or you'll live a miserable life of what if's and what could have beens. Are the odds against immediate success against you? Maybe. Sure. Who gives a fuck.Go for it. Even if you "fail" you'll still learn a bunch of shit and be better for the effort in more ways than you can ever imagine.

Re:Reality Check: Go for your dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the story of my life. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten an idea, prototyped it, and let it sit and gather dust. Only to watch, a couple years later, someone get rich off the same idea BECAUSE they took it and ran with it. I'm content (or maybe not) with just throwing shit on the wall and see if it sticks. Once I've proven my idea I just let it languish. Don't let this be you - trust me. I get depressed almost everyday when I think of the money I didn't make.

Re:Reality Check: Go for your dreams

[bob_super]

Graduate first. Then go for your dreams.
Because if you fail and you have to fall back on normal employment, dropping out has just put you all the way back to the end of the line, behind all the unemployed educated people.

You can waste a few years after college in dead-end attempts. You can explain that in an interview, it might be a positive (because you're entrepreneurial, and because you've failed and won't be running off again soon).
But if you didn't graduate, you aren't likely to get the interview in the first place.

Re:Reality Check: Go for your dreams

[Oligonicella]

"...behind all the unemployed educated people."

Gotta say, that's not much of an incentive. **Those** unemployed people have enormous debts to *still* pay off. You won't. College is overrated.

Re:Reality Check: Go for your dreams

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you live in the US...

Re:Reality Check: Go for your dreams

[david_thornley]

Not quite. If you drop out of college and try to make a startup go, you're getting valuable experience. Not getting the degree means it'll be harder to get the interview, but lots of employers would consider the experience a definite plus.

Not to mention, if you fail fast enough as an entrepeneur, you likely can finish college. It should be a lot easier, given more maturity.

Re:Reality Check: Go for your dreams

[bob_super]

Stats are formal that the average person with a degree makes a lot more than the average without. It's still true, even if the numbers have been changing.

And when HR is sorting through 20+ (or 2000) resumes for a position, failing the "BS required, MS preferred" is the easiest and most lawyer-free way to send yours to the recycle bin.

How did you finance your startup? Can you still afford to finish college? The bankers prefer to lend money to people with a real degree...

YMMV, but the odds are against you. It's just gambling the rest of your life.

Re:Reality Check: Go for your dreams

[david_thornley]

Sure, the college degree is, on the average, beneficial. We're not talking about average people here, since average people don't start their own businesses nowadays. This applies to your other points also: dropping out of college to start a business is not for average people.

Re:Not enough jobs? I thought not enough candidate

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, people still want to get paid for programming for others. Until people are willing to work for free, people running these companies will continue complaining about the "shortage".

Powerball = 1:175,223,510 odds

[Anonymous Coward]

Winning the Powerball jackpot is one in 175 million.

There are not anywhere close to 175 million app startups out there so therefore you would have a better chance blowing your college money by starting up an app business

RE: Powerball = 1:175,223,510 odds

[bramblez]

Only if you have $2 (the cost per ticket) saved for college. If you have $35,000, that buys 17,500 tickets. Now your odds of winning are 1-(174999999/175000000)^17500 = one in 10,000.5 I'm guessing this is of the same order as the number of app startups, or at least the ratio of apps that lead to a 7 figure payout.

Wait a minute!

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you telling me that a story in the Harvard Business Journal, published by Harvard College, tells students not to drop out of expensive college courses?

Inconceivable!

Re:Wait a minute!

[GrantRobertson]

I don't think that reference means what you think it means.

Shouldn't this be a Reality Check for Investors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do startups get the money to Start Up?

From some dummy who thinks a stupid me-too style app is going to get traction in a flooded marketplace.

Then again look at the cottage industry "Flappy Bird" produced almost overnight

Maybe I'm the dumb one

The role of an established company

[tepples]

Established companies prefer college graduates. College gets you past an established company's HR.

Those who control certain popular mobile and set-top platforms prefer developers with experience working for established companies. (Source: warioworld.com/apply) Working for an established company gets you past the platform's developer approval.

republicans turned america into winner takes all

[Anonymous Coward]

no point in worker for somebody else and living in constant fear of outsourcing, health care costs, foreclosure etc. might as well go for the gusto since you're just going to end up poor and unemployed anyways.

Doing the math...

[eric4209]

So reading the NYT article, the boys had the idea in Dec 2011 and released their app in Jan 2013. So a year with two people, learning to build an app, etc. They split $30,000...

Now let me preface this by saying that the skills they learned are worth money, knowledge is invaluable. But I meet people every week who are looking to make a quick buck off of apps. I would imagine these boys put in at least 1000 hours on this initiative, plus all the spend for the traveling and stuff they did. All said and done, they probably made minimum wage at best off this app.

The new tech bubble is mobile.

Re:Doing the math...

[tlambert]

$30,000 / 1000 = $30 an hour. Just saying.

Re:Doing the math...

[Anonymous Coward]

$30 an hour is shit for good programmers. I earn over double that as base and have full benefits.

Re:Doing the math...

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed what the authors failed to see; that the real value is the education gained in failing at your first business. That's worth a whole hell of a lot more than the 4 years I wasted at UCLA.

It was rejected. Now what?

[tepples]

Robert Pelloni went for it but famously got rejected. Plenty of developers have had their App Store apps rejected as well. What's the best practice to deal with rejection of your application by a platform's exclusive gatekeeper?

Re:It was rejected. Now what?

[khellendros1984]

What's the best practice to deal with rejection of your application by a platform's exclusive gatekeeper?

Depends on the rules that the gatekeeper has for acceptance. It should be noted that in Nintendo's case, the answer is "Rule 1: Be a big game developer. Rule 2: Don't be a small game developer." (as opposed to "lock yourself in a room for 100 days"). If some platform has overly-onerous requirements, find another platform; you've got plenty of choices out there, and none of them are big enough to be the only practical option.

Re:It was rejected. Now what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn a hard lesson about writing portable code from day 1. Yes, all the game engines are different; but you should be able to separate those concerns. Most of what you contribute should be levels, art, and game logic which don't depend on the engine.

Re:It was rejected. Now what?

[CronoCloud]

Bob's game is your reference? Bob Pelloni was a flake, you don't think Nintendo couldn't figure that out?

The day of a single guy in a basement is over. If you don't want to deal with the gatekeepers find another platform. If you want to do a game on a specific platform, you deal with the gatekeepers for it.

Re:It was rejected. Now what?

[tepples]

I don't want a specific platform. I want a specific class of platforms. The problem prior to things like Pub Fund was that all platforms in the class had similar harsh policies. But now that I've read about Pub Fund, I'll go away for a while.

Re:It was rejected. Now what?

[Anonymous Coward]

rejection of your application by a platform's exclusive gatekeeper?

You already dun goofed.

There is no way to know...

[nomad63]

There is no way to know how many developers had flopped, with respect to the flappy birds, or angry birds developers of the app wars. No programmer will admit defeat publicly and come out saying , "I have worked so many hundreds of hours on my game/app and realized that I can not make it marketable or make money out f it anyway, so I abandoned it". We all are spoon-fed by any media outlet, how great this app or that game is and at 99 cents-a-pop, it is a steal. And oh-by-the-way, the app developer got crazy rich, selling the stupid game. Which basically primes the inexperienced new-comers, thinking into, they will be the next shiz-nit of the app world. And when the failure strike, they will never admit to defeat. Hence we will never know what the real ratio of success over failure will be. Although, anyone with a smidgen of common sense, can say it is very close to ZERO. Reminds me the Big Bang Theory episode, in which the nerd crew decided to develop an app for solving quadratic equations that one snaps the picture of and Howard saying, "to make that kind of money, we have to charge $12,000+ per copy of the app".

So, I wish good luck to the new comers to the wonderful world of IT, who are expecting to strike it rich by coding a few hundred lines and create the next killer app. Real life slaps you hard and good.

Re:There is no way to know...

[Quirkz]

I think a lot of solo/indie developers would be happy to talk about their failures, if you ask them. It's just not *news* so you won't have any such stories fed to you.

Peak oil

[cyberspittle]

If you are not in early, you get lost in the flood of apps. Time for the next big thing.

Powerball odds

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Android and IPhone each have about a million apps (6 months ago, http://mashable.com/2013/07/24/google-play-1-million/ ) on their respective app stores, so let's say there are a nice round 2 million mobile apps. If every mobile app were a Powerball ticket, there's a 98.7% chance that not a single one has hit it big. Writing a wildly successful app is a long shot, but so much so that it is obviously foolish like the lottery.

Especially while you're going to college, it's possible to dabble in this kind of startup without any real negative consequences for your future career development. College kids can be lazy and no more interested in education than as an excuse to party away from home. They can also be extremely motivated and driven with a lot of energy and free time to create.

HA!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's funny that someone is calling out the ego maniacs for a change... Heaven forbid he be correct.

Re:This completely disregards the educational valu

[Anonymous Coward]

Building stuff on your own teaches you stuff *faster* than a standard curriculum.

Anybody learning "to a curriculum" shouldn't be in college. There are only bare minimums to pass exams, and everything else you do while surrounded by experienced researchers and keen peers.

You learn more there about business

"Learning about business" is like "learning how to live in your own house" - you don't do it instead of something else, but instead wait until you're ready, and then learn as you need it. Unless you're running a huge company, which you're not.

Why not do both and figure out what works best for you? It's better for these young people to try things on their own and THEN go to college so that they have more life experience.

College is primarily an academic exercise. "Life experience" isn't relevant, unless it's academic life experience.

Re:Not enough jobs? I thought not enough candidate

[bob_super]

There's a severe shortage of programmers with 25 years experience in Java, gimme more H1B.

Lies (Sort of ...) ...

[TrollstonButterbeans]

Opportunity is an intangible but sometimes it stares you in the face and you have to answer the door.

Sure, many startup dreams are irrational and almost no one is going to end being a billionaire, but if you have an approach to a problem that few others see and are willing to accept the risks ... GO FOR IT!

Or live a life of wondering "what if"?

Few people as a percent are suited to take the risks of a startup company, but when you are young the risks are the most easy to handle and if you fail, just go get a "real" job. Or work on your startup at night, work a real job during the day.

Live life saying you tried and gave it your all for an interesting idea! You might lose, but even moderate success in a small business is a lot of money.

So then we don't need more H1Bs?!

[Anonymous Coward]

What a surprise! More gaming of the job market by IT companies.

I have been there - Mobile Apps

[rrr00bb5454]

For mobile apps, this is actually not a bad idea if you can afford to fail; because you are still unattached enough that nobody depends on your income in a critical way. If nobody is going to pay your way through college, then you have nothing to lose. Get your failures and experience in before you have a house and a kid. LinkedIn will light up for you as a side-effect. A lot of my friends are the top developers in the iOS music app space; and I was in the mosh pit trying to make it happen along with them (while working a good full-time job - contemplating full time app dev). A small number of them make a healthy living doing little more than occasional maintenance on long-shipped apps while using the rest of their time learning the craft and having a life. 90% of them fail badly, with improved job prospects. The 30% Apple tax is high, but the mobile user mindset is what makes it hard. The large volume of users that can drive your asking price down nicely can also be a major support nightmare because you have to deal with them directly. You will deal with fads, gaming the review system (ie: send you an email that implies that if they don't get something for free in a few days that you will get a 1 star review, or requesting refunds while keeping the app and still sending support questions for months on end). The huge numbers of apps can make it hard to get a foothold on iOS/Android. On other platforms, even a well promoted and executed (even best and only for its category) app can still fail because there really are almost no users. Even given a *great* app and somebody that's good at the business, it's still far more of a gamble than showing up to a job and knowing how much you will make. But it's far better to do this while you are living with your mom than sitting around doing nothing or working an unskilled job for minimum wage.

College ain't so great either

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that for 22 year olds with college degrees the unemployment rate is 11% and the undermployment rate is north of 60%, going to college doesn't exactly sound like a great idea either.

True, college grads are better off than non in this environment in terms of employment numbers. But if you've got $20-$100k to pay your way through college or need to borrow $20-$100k to get through it, it may be better saving those funds/not building up the debt and instead finding a creative way to put your skills/talent/knowledge to work.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/16/recent-college-grad_n_4602772.html

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/12/05/twice-as-many-college-grads-in-minimum-wage-jobs-as-5-years-ago

we're not at the top yet

[Anonymous Coward]

But getting close. Every tom dick and harry is getting millions in funding for their largely unprofitable shit ideas. Share stuff socially with friends? Wow Amazing! Here's $5m. The crash may not happen this year, but oh yes it will happen.

Independent developers

[Anonymous Coward]

The article is talking about Independent App developers.

To make a living in the US and this is living cheap - you need to sell $50,000 per year worth of apps. After SS, taxes, etc ... you'll have a take home pay of about $35,000.

Now, go up to your favorite app store and see how many apps are selling at those levels - remember per year. So, if an app has been around for a couple of years, it'll need to have sold at least $100,000 worth. That's 100,000 at $0.99.

And I didn't even mention startup costs: computers, devices, developer fees, etc ....

tl;dr: the only app developers I know making a living developing apps have a W2 job working for a company that uses their apps as part of their service - examples: NetFlix, Weather Channel, The Economist, Amazon, Napa, etc ....

Living with their moms

[Anonymous Coward]

'A few may win big; many or most will end up living with their moms.'

So situation normal then?

How about?

[CuteSteveJobs]

How about graduates switch back to solving problems in science, engineering, health. Stuff that matters. The world needs another Facebook or another "app for that" like it needs a hole in the head.

Re:How about?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a chicken or the egg problem. How will we know how badly we need a hole in the head without solving problems in science and health?

get rich success rate always been single digits

[peter303]

Where it was the PC rush of the 1980s, dot.com 1.0 or the current mobile App era. You just try over and over. I've known people who have joined a half dozen startups before doing well.

Humans live a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not let kids try their dream or try and make some cash early in life? It may work out for them it may not. Life is a gamble. Having a college education doesn't guarantee success and there are many college graduates that move in with their parents after they graduate.

It's easy to live as an independent app dev

[SuperKendall]

The article is talking about Independent App developers.

I am one.

To make a living in the US and this is living cheap - you need to sell $50,000 per year worth of apps.

Let's pretend $50k is not overly high.

You need to sell a combination of enough apps AND earn consulting income worth $50k.

THAT is not hard if you are skilled.

And I didn't even mention startup costs: computers, devices, developer fees, etc ....

Which can be as little as $1k if you buy lower end computers/devices. You only need to spend that about once a year if you are keeping up on newer devices, less if you skip a few generations.

You can also keep using that computer for 3-4 years.

the only app developers I know making a living developing apps have a W2 job working for a company

But the point is said companies (and lots of other smaller companies besides) still have a lot of need for developers.

Re:It's easy to live as an independent app dev

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's pretend $50k is not overly high.

If you are an independent business person, you have to cover all the payroll taxes, workman's comp, unemployment insurance, and there's a couple more that I can't remember because I have my accountant handle that. If you want to take home $35,000 per year - and that's about what it would take to have an one bedroom apartment, car, insurance, health insurance, and no family - you have to gross $50,000/year.

You need to sell a combination of enough apps AND earn consulting income worth $50k.

THAT is not hard if you are skilled.

Ah yes, the "consulting" gigs - assuming it is not "THAT" hard , that means you are driving sales (being your own salesman) or you have a body shop do that for you. Meaning, that is time you have to spend on your business (or extra overhead if farming that out to a bodyshop) that you have to include: if you work 2,000 per year developing and another 500 hours (that's LOW) at sales, then you need to take your annual income and divide by 2,500 spent on your business. And if you do your own books and other things, those hours get added in.

Let's put it this way, I have a feeling that if I looked at your books, I wouldn't be impressed. But if that's something you love to do, well, it's not for me to criticize.

Re:It's easy to live as an independent app dev

[david_thornley]

If you are an independent business person, you have to cover all the payroll taxes, workman's comp, unemployment insurance, and there's a couple more that I can't remember because I have my accountant handle that.

Depends. Are you incorporated? If so, then your S-corp or whatever presumably has you as an employee, and you may well have all of those. If not, then you're self-employed, and all you have to cover is all the payroll taxes (but you do get an income tax deduction on half of them).

I went for it.

[Anonymous Coward]

And I failed.

I now have almost $150,000 in debt, ruined credit, and no job prospects. What should I have done different?

I shouldn't have been so optimistic. A bit of pessimism is good for getting a reality check.

That's the trouble, we see all these success stories out there in the media and never the failures which then gives us a skewed perception of our chances of succeeding.

Re:I went for it.

[Xaedalus]

Mod up please--this is the argument against Grand OP

Re:I went for it.

[Anonymous Coward]

no job prospects

I find this aspect hard to believe. I would think that now you are well qualified for all sorts of salaried work. Perhaps you are still being optimistic that you can pay of $150k in a signing bonus or something.

Re:I went for it.

[Areyoukiddingme]

I now have almost $150,000 in debt, ruined credit, and no job prospects. What should I have done different?

I went for it.

I failed.

I have no debt other than the mortgage I started with, excellent credit, and a good job. What did I do differently?

I gave up when the money ran out and went back to work for The Man, rather than throw good money after bad. Trying to launch a startup is a gamble and should be treated precisely the same way. Only use money you can afford to lose and do not spend one thin dime of money you don't have trying to "win it all back" if you hit bottom. Quit and go home.

Too late for you, but for other people thinking about it, this can't be repeated enough.

Re:I went for it.

[Anonymous Coward]

How the fuck did you blow $150,000 on developing a fucking app? No wonder you failed, god damn.

Re:I went for it.

[phantomfive]

I now have almost $150,000 in debt, ruined credit, and no job prospects. What should I have done different?

Not paid for everything on high-interest credit cards?

Re:I went for it.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an argument against a culture that (poorly) rewards subservience and punishes personal drive, ambition.

Re:I went for it.

[slashdot_commentator]

No, this is a capitalist culture. You exploit the gullible.

Re:I went for it.

[itsdapead]

I now have almost $150,000 in debt, ruined credit, and no job prospects. What should I have done different?

Not run up $150,000 in debt.

If developing your world-beating software cost more than a chunk of your spare time (while continuing in college), a hundred bucks or so for developer subscriptions and the use of a PC that you would have bought anyway, you did it wrong.

If you're building a better mousetrap, you'll hit the unavoidable roadblock where you need to manufacture thousands of the things to get them into the shops, and you'll need finance. With software - that needn't happen. Even in the bad old days before the internet, blank floppies were cheap, the elbow-grease needed to make 100 copies was free and the mark-up on the first 100 would easily pay to get the next 1000 professionally duplicated.

Now, with the internet, you don't have to do anything in quantity - and Apple, google, Amazon et. al. will not only put them on their virtual shelves but also handle all the payment processing for a measly 30% commission. It always amuses me when I see developers whinging at that.

The danger is that, at the age of 17, a few thousand bucks falling into your lap seems like a fortune. It isn't.

Software sales back in the 90s and early 00s paid for my house but (and this is important) paid for my house while the day job was paying for everything else. Its not a very big house.

Re:I went for it.

[Anonymous Coward]

First line of your post:
>I went for it

Following key words:
>give up
>trying
>gambling
>only
>do not spend
>quit

You didn't go for anything, you eyed it and carefully prodded it from a distance with a stick.

Most of us can't even do that, we don't have an extra $100,000 post-safetynet stick that we can burn without consequence.

Not to say your stance is wrong. It would be folly to think that the arena of 21st century business is fair, honest, or viable to commoners. You'll never succeed using the "front door". So throwing in your shirt and sticking your neck out for decks stacked this bad is, as you say, a Bad Idea.

If you're gonna try something New And Exciting don't listen to anyone that won't acknowledge the very real chance of customers/clients/required business relations becoming a very underwhelming turnout. Near-zero return can happen on any maneuver.

-AC.Falos

Re:I went for it.

[khchung]

First line of your post:
>I went for it

Following key words:
>give up
>trying
>gambling
>only
>do not spend
>quit

You didn't go for anything, you eyed it and carefully prodded it from a distance with a stick.

Most of us can't even do that, we don't have an extra $100,000 post-safetynet stick that we can burn without consequence.

Not to say your stance is wrong. It would be folly to think that the arena of 21st century business is fair, honest, or viable to commoners. You'll never succeed using the "front door". So throwing in your shirt and sticking your neck out for decks stacked this bad is, as you say, a Bad Idea.

If you're gonna try something New And Exciting don't listen to anyone that won't acknowledge the very real chance of customers/clients/required business relations becoming a very underwhelming turnout. Near-zero return can happen on any maneuver.

-AC.Falos

You know this is the same battle cry for every "aggressively scheduled" death-march project? Old devs like me, who have heard this battle cry more times than I can remember, will recognize it for what it is - B.S.

Gamble is gamble. Sure, someone wins the lottery once in a while, but making a huge gamble is NOT the only way to plan for success.

Your idea is no different from "passionate" execs calling for developers to work 12 hours a day for months because "we can't succeed without giving 120%!"

Sorry, have seen these "aggressive" projects crash and burn too many times (along with the fools who heed the battle cry) to NOT realize this is BS. Successful projects come from careful planning and the discipline in not take too large a bite. I went from one successful project to another, to another, ..., not by gambling big, but by not taking unjustified chances, and always have a fallback plan.

The GP is right on the money. If you ask the founders of any successful startup, chances are they have failed at least once in the past. Only by knowing when to stop can they try again later. If they had insisted on digging themselves deeper in any one of their past failures, chances are they would be able to try again and eventually succeed.

Re:I went for it.

[Areyoukiddingme]

You didn't go for anything, you eyed it and carefully prodded it from a distance with a stick.

You think? I spent three years without a job, writing code 10 to 12 hours a day on weekdays and 2-4 hours a day on weekends. I spent my entire (liquid) life savings staying current on that mortgage and paying for utilities and food. I had $600 left in the bank when my first paycheck at my new job arrived. I don't know what your definition of "went for it" is, but that should be good enough for anyone.

(Actually I spent 34 months without a job, if you want to be excruciatingly precise.)

Taxes, Pizza, Beer, Rent, Insurance, Gas...

[Anonymous Coward]

how much of that cash was pocketed, and not written off as a business expense?

Most of these guys got connections

[rsilvergun]

their moms/dads are rich. They can blow off school and go back whenever you feel like it. If you look at just about every successfully "Entrepreneur" they come from upper (way upper) middle class to very rich.

We here in America like to pretend we've got a lot of upward mobility that isn't really there. So when somebody starts making millions we pretend they pulled themselves up by bootstraps. Heck, Bill Gates started out with nothing except a 1 million dollar trust fund, his father's years of experience as a business lawyer and his mother's seat on IBM. If he can make it anyone can.

Re:Most of these guys got connections

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve Jobs was the only guy with no connections whatsoever. He built his empire from scratch. He's pretty rare though, the only one I have found and I read the bios of all the tech stars.

Re:Most of these guys got connections

[Anonymous Coward]

He was fortunate enough to be introduced to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Markkula. $250K in 1977 and a partner who had all the connections and knew the business is a hell of a boost.

Today, they'd probably get sued into bankruptcy by a bullshit patent they couldn't afford to defend.

The startup game is a ruse, get a decent everybody tech job. Enjoy your youth, you only have it once.

Re:Most of these guys got connections

[rrr00bb5454]

There are other ways, like the military. I work at a place that is full of kernel developers. Most of our people have college degrees, but it seems that our best people went straight into tech work in the Israeli military and didn't stop to go to college when their mandatory service was up. It's different from the US because everybody does 3 years of military before they are able to go to college; but it seems to effectively provide a nationalized trade school that precedes college.

Re:This completely disregards the educational valu

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked on a project on my own that has about 200 or so users. When applying for a job, nobody from a well established company seems to give a shit. Just saying.

Your estimates are still too high

[SuperKendall]

If you want to take home $35,000 per year...you have to gross $50,000/year.

The overhead of $15k still seems a little high, but it's the $35k that I think provides a lot of room for living in and could be lower without issue, if money or material things were not a focus and you live in the right area.

if you work 2,000 per year developing and another 500 hours (that's LOW) at sales

Remember how I said I was an independent app developer? So I have actual experience with what it takes to be one?

Working 2000 hours means 100k-200k in income (or more depending on what you can get).

For sales hours (recruiting clients) ever since the start of my mobile development consulting, I have spent very few hours on that alone, because lots of companies large and small are looking for developers and they have come to me. Even factoring in training to keep current you are at far less than 500 hours needed. I am sure at some point I may have to exert more effort in finding clients but 500 is very high for a competent programmer.

Re:Your estimates are still too high

[slashdot_commentator]

The overhead in $15K is not overhead; a huge chunk of it is taxes & the "payroll end" of taxes. If anything, the overhead is a little low.

Re:Your estimates are still too high

[antsbull]

Problem is, you are having to do consulting work on top of selling apps - which in itself proves that you are not making enough to live from app sales. You've pretty much confirmed what the parent poster said - that its pretty hard for indie app developers to make a living.

Bankruptcy?

[SuperKendall]

I now have almost $150,000 in debt, ruined credit

Then aren't you the perfect candidate for bankruptcy?

and no job prospects

What the hell company did you spend $150k+ on that you have no marketable skills from? You are ether lying or a moron.

People don't care if a company you worked forwent bankrupt. Hell, in a lot of circles it's seen as a badge of honor.

Re:Bankruptcy?

[Lodlaiden]

I now have almost $150,000 in debt, ruined credit

Then aren't you the perfect candidate for bankruptcy?

and no job prospects

What the hell company did you spend $150k+ on that you have no marketable skills from? You are ether lying or a moron.

He paid himself 75k a year to play flappy birds.

We do have lots of upward mobility

[SuperKendall]

I came from a very poor family, I was able to pay for college and end up with a great career without any financial help from family.

It's still very possible if your parents are not well off. In some ways it's even easier because you can get a lot of loans and grants for school if your parents are below a certain income level.

The great thing about learning to develop is that it does not take a huge amount of capital resource to get started.

Re:We do have lots of upward mobility

[rsilvergun]

It's possible, but most don't make it. Everyone remembers Abe Lincoln, but can you name any of those kids from his Log Cabin School?

Also, learning to develop is now very, very expensive. A college degree that was $50k in my day is $200k now. That degree gets you the same $50k to $60k year job today, but with 4 times more debt...

You got lucky enough to pick an industry that didn't get devastated in your area and you didn't have anything really, really awful happen to you. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for you, but you're very much the exception, not the rule...

Percentages not a good view on the matter

[SuperKendall]

Looking at percentages of apps for things like the possibility of app store success is foolish.

That's because it's not random. For instance, if you develop another TODO or flashlight app I can say 100% you are not going to "hit big".

Your success in any app store is not wholly chance. It a combination of how good of an application you have developed, along with some marketing. There are random people that get elevated without the marketing, but it's not like you have to rely on that as the only mechanism to success. It's just a bonus event for someone.

Mod parent up!

[Kludge]

Taking advice from an MBA is a bad idea.
The reality is that if you blow a couple years of your life learning how to code and build apps, that is a great two years of your life spent, whether your app is "successful" or not. You will have learned a lot and people with good technical skills will always be in demand.

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

my parents are both MBA's... I wish I could cite this quotation from a more trusted source, as I loathe their advice.

No reality check needed

[LF11]

Programming is one of the few industries with a reasonable unemployment rate composed largely of people who are voluntarily between jobs. In my opinion (having gone into a programming career straight out of high school, then going to college at 26) skipping the fucking bullshit in higher ed and going straight for programming is a perfectly valid and appropriate course of action.

Skip the debt. Skip the "social justice" BS while money slips away from you like diarrhea. Skip the booze and marijuana and dead-end "self-discovery." Go straight to where it counts, and build a life in a field where lives and careers are still being built.

My company just upgraded their dev position hiring rec to always-on. We now are hiring (competent) devs any time we find them, regardless of whether we have a place for them at that moment.

Re:No reality check needed

[Anonymous Coward]

My company just upgraded their dev position hiring rec to always-on. We now are hiring (competent) devs any time we find them, regardless of whether we have a place for them at that moment.

What is the definition of a competent developer according to your company? And by "my company" do you mean you are the owner or just another employee?

$30 an hour is actually fantastic for these kids.

[tlambert]

$30 an hour is shit for good programmers. I earn over double that as base and have full benefits.

$30 an hour is actually fantastic for these kids.

They're not good programmers, they're high school sophomores, one is barely old enough to get a restricted drivers license, they don't have enough formal education that they wouldn't be lost in a team meeting where "big-O" notation or "trie" were mentioned, and they wouldn't be able to communicate with their peers effectively, even if it was just over email to avoid the whole ageism thing.

That's $62,400 per year, and even if we split that between two of them, that's $31,200 each, which is 25% more than the college interns with three years of college toward a CS degree were making.

And even divided, it's higher than the starting salary of a public school teacher with a masters in education (because it's required to get the job and the teachers union membership) in the San Francisco Unified School district.

Right...

[Anonymous Coward]

The market is just unable to absorb all of the Computer Science graduates who spent 4 years specializing in "Hello World!", "Hello Bubble Sort!" and all the other "in-demand" versions of Hello World type programs that businesses just for some odd reason can't live without.

Right

[Hategrin]

Because without formal training in writing all the different version of Hello World, like Hello Bubble Sort, and Hello Linked List, a person has absolutely no skill as a developer to speak of. As for the Target application, it's hard to tell who coded it, cause that "leaky application" was a fucking Trojan Horse Virus installed by people with access to a system, as if the operating system being programmed by a college grad would even matter to a hacker with physical access to the machine from breaking in. So you spent 4-8 years of college and you still can't differentiate a Trojan Horse from a exploit?

It's amazing isn't it

[Hategrin]

For all the claims about college degrees turning people into sub-geniuses, and being the only source on Earth where you can find "critical thinking skills", the college suckers/shills on here claim to have, they still can't piece together that the main reason college is associated with financial success is because there is something called a "marketing team" that tries to inflate the "public image" of these very expensive schools. I used to be a hiring manager at Jason's Deli, the fact is many of the "cream of the crop" college grads weren't even fit for employment washing dishes, and only a single one ever made manager at my store.

It doesn't cost...

[Hategrin]

It doesn't cost anywhere near 30,000$ to make an app. I have friends who 2 years ago didn't know a single line of C++, they signed up for MS Bizspark, got a free copy of Visual Studio Ultimate (I think registering a business is about 50 bucks), and they wrote an app. They have also published books/training courses on how to write software within the bounds of various frameworks. This person didn't even finish high-school, much less College, and the content that he has produced/licensed is making him about 3,000 a month while he spends all of his time working on his next release.

30k a year isn't really that bad, especially when you consider the cold hard fact that overwhelming majority of college graduates end up making something close to minimum wage, not six figures a year with limitless benefits and paid vacations like these college PR firms like to lead us to believe.

Re:It doesn't cost...

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't cost anywhere near 30,000$ to make an app. I have friends who 2 years ago didn't know a single line of C++, they signed up for MS Bizspark, got a free copy of Visual Studio Ultimate (I think registering a business is about 50 bucks), and they wrote an app. They have also published books/training courses on how to write software within the bounds of various frameworks. This person didn't even finish high-school, much less College, and the content that he has produced/licensed is making him about 3,000 a month while he spends all of his time working on his next release.

30k a year isn't really that bad, especially when you consider the cold hard fact that overwhelming majority of college graduates end up making something close to minimum wage, not six figures a year with limitless benefits and paid vacations like these college PR firms like to lead us to believe.

It's 30K a year divided by two.... so 15k per person. That's about $7.50 an hour. It's more about opportunity cost I would say - what you COULD be making instead.

Re:It doesn't cost...

[rrr00bb5454]

You have to calculate it as: (Sales + JobOpportunities - (Taxes + Hardware + Software + Books + TheJobYouCantTakeWhileYouDoDev)) .... If you really are good enough to make a profitable app that covers all of your costs, then TheJobYouCantTakeWhileYouDoDev is about $100000. I put my well paid day job at risk doing part time mobile app development for a few years. My partner did in fact quit to do it full time (and eventually got tired of making $30k a year for 60hr workweeks doing work at about the $130k/year level - and found a remote development gig through the connections that app development gave him.) I calculate that had I quit the job to do it full time, it would be roughly competitive with my day job; but with very large variables for both risk and future opportunities. I consider it roughly equivalent to getting a Masters Degree. I learned a lot about the business side of development.

And if you did graduate...

[Hategrin]

You're probably not going to get an interview either. The majority of college graduates, in many areas and in general end up working low-income jobs, under 20,000 a year. Now, that's probably different if you went to an Ivy League school, or if you majored in something like Nursing or Law, but we're talking about Computer Science here, right?

Computer Science is a complete sham at most colleges. I have a degree in CS from an accredited college, the most advanced thing we wrote was a linked list that we tested with something similar to a "Hello World" application. The only things I really got out of college were in the English/Rhetoric courses. After I graduated, I found out that I wasn't any more employable by adding a photocopy of my degree to my application/resume. I couldn't even get an >interviewexperience

With that degree that is marketed as a key that will open any door for you in life, after a year of hard work I went on to become an assistant manager at a Jason's Deli. Not a single other manager was a college graduate, none of the college grads were worth much more than minimum wage, they simply didn't have any experience/knowledge of how to run a business (payroll / taxes).

Re:And if you did graduate...

[narcc]

I found out that I wasn't any more employable by adding a photocopy of my degree to my application/resume

WTF? If such a thing landed on my desk, I'd probably just toss it in the bin, along with the resume.

The real winners in any war are the arms dealers

[gman003]

The company I work for does a lot of contract work making apps (it's about a third of our business, the rest being traditional websites or a pair of large, ongoing projects). People come to us with an app idea, we charge them for us to build it (plus hourly rates for continued updates or changes), they get all the profits from it, if any.

As far as I've heard, very few have actually turned a profit for their owners. Most are genuinely useless apps, that nobody would ever pay to use. Others are decent ideas that compete with too many similar ones. And often they're poorly-designed or have other limitations that prevent us from actually making a good app (for one in particular, we did the app but the server-side code was done by another group of contractors, who seem to hail from Elbonia judging by the fact that it takes 15 minutes for a user login call to succeed - the app has a one-star rating even though we did everything we could to make it better, even offering to take over the webservice side).

Still, we get paid well to do it all. We're never going to make a massively-successful app (or if we do, we're not getting massive stacks of cash from it), but we usually turn a profit on each project because we get paid regardless of whether the app succeeds or not.

Like the old saying goes, the real winners in a war are the ones selling the guns. In a tech bubble, the real winners are the contract companies.

Uni != Skills or learning.

[DMJC]

From all the comp-sci grads I've seen, going to uni taught them java, entry level c++ (a single shitty communications arts subject) and an intro to SQL on Oracle, also how to install a linux distro, but not use it for anything, so noone touched it again. Almost none of those people work in a real Comp-sci related job. Most ended up as sysadmins in schools or companies. Having the paper meant they knew "IT" most of them can't do anything except pick Microsoft Products and sign SLAs. If you want to be an app developer my advice is get a real IT job, and make apps at home on the side. If they take off, great quit your job, you made it. If not, eh? you have a job like the rest of us.

Really now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, it was absolutely impossible to get on XBLA/XBLIG, not to speak about that hard to get and learn XNA framework.

Meanwhile, until WiiU poor show made them think otherwise, Nintendo's answer to "How do I get your SDK?" was basically "If you have to ask, you're not getting one"

Re:Really now?

[Stolovaya]

Exactly. Here's just one example of Nintendo dropping the ball. Some people easily forget that they treat a lot of developers poorly. http://www.games.slashdot.org/...

Re:$30 an hour is actually fantastic for these kid

[StripedCow]

The problem is that this is still a "success story".

If the success story earns slightly above average, then you probably don't want to know what the average earnings are.

Great Advice!

[msmonroe]

From my observation of the start-up community it seems obvious that 99% of the engineering students should continue to pursue their degrees and work on their dreams of becoming billionaires on the weekend or in their spare time. I am speaking in generalities and could be full of crap! Your mileage will vary!

Most entrepreneurs would not use the product they are working on daily; I know their are exceptions, thanks!

Most of the ideas that people come up with fit into 4 basic categories.
1. The idea is actually a feature that could be implemented in an existing piece of software but it is not worth becoming an actual stand alone business and would probably not bring in any paying business.
2. The idea is actually a really horrible idea and they are either too delusional or have been lied to about how bad it is and they just don't know.
3. The idea can make money; but it's actually an idea that is a business niche and could generate some income but it is not a huge business!
4. The idea is a copycat; unlikely to make money, why go with a copycat when you can go with the original product. Brand inertia is difficult to overcome.

Being part of a start-up is also pretty crappy, Hollywood makes it out to be this big glamorous adventure; The expectation is that you'll spend all your time and excess money into the start-up; it's like being divorced with 3 kids and your ex-wife is a gold digger and drags you back to court every chance she gets to get more money out of you.

Even if you get funded the Angel/VC , seems like the terms are almost interchangeable nowadays, they will want you to still work for free; yeah work for free! I know there's a lot of talk about how much compensation do you take out once your funded but the truth is that it is almost always doesn't happen.

If your lucky enough to make it all the way to the end and sell out to larger business or go public your compensation at the end is usually comparable to those that worked professionally during that same period of time or less.

Even with all that though it still depends on what your long term goals; if you want to get experience in building a business and leveraging finance then it could end up being worth it. If your expectation is a really painful get rich quick scheme I'd advise staying away.

It still my dream...

[HetMes]

I know the statistics, but I also know the apps out there. And I can say that even most of the 5 star apps just simply suck; they do one or two just wrong or not at all.

My motto is going to be "We did it just right", and I believe achieving that to be a seriously underappreciated and especially in IT underdeveloped skill. I like my chances.

Incorrect: We have a College Bubble

[VortexCortex]

In the 70's we did not need degrees to get most jobs. We still do not need degrees to work most jobs, the tools have gotten more complex, but their interfaces remain as easy and teachable as ever through on the job training, if not more so. In fact, at many fields where they've contracted my computing related solutions I put in place systems that require ME to know the jobs of their workers better than their workers themselves, and yet I am a software and hardware architect, not a chemist. I overheard a chemist new hire being told, "You got a degree, that shows you were interested. Forget that stuff you learned in college, you'll learn our process and as long as you didn't flunk highschool chemistry, you'll do fine."

Degrees can be seen as a barrier to entry to the poor who self educate. The final exam itself is problematic because degree mills exist. This is true even in the field of computer programming. I have met masters of computer science that can spout mountains of complexity theory but can not code anything more complex than what I teach 12 year old children at the community center on alternate weekends.

Don't you see? This is the Information Age. College degrees are unnecessary. Colleges are no longer the noble institutions they once were in the 70's when you didn't need a degree to get a job. They should be elective learning centers, not defacto requirement for employment. Now they sadde people with large debts and useless mandatory studies to extract more wealth, and even their corporate co-conspirators leverage the degrees for their devious ends. That's why even though much research has shown that even 60 year old coders run rings around newbies, corporations value "new degrees" in new languages or platforms -- ignoring that the experienced developer picks up platforms and languages without needing degrees as a matter of doing their job. The younger guy works harder instead of smarter, but their insurance is cheaper: They want young obedient singles. That's why you're dead to silicon valley at the child raising age of 40...

Colleges have become political social justice indoctrination camps where new ideas and research are stifled in the name of ideology. The stench of the dark ages shrouds these idealogical echo chambers. We need to dismantle these gatekeepers of employment before we find ourselves in an even darker age. Granting colleges defacto monopoly over white-collar employment is folly: Power corrupts, and brother, they are rife with the stuff. We need to outlaw the final exam, and use Entrance Exams to PROVE you know what you need to know to do the job you'll be doing. Many jobs do this already, so that means requiring a degree is merely a means to discriminate on the poor who could not afford college but are self educated at or above said degree's level. College degrees have become a system for oppression. They have become a means to force workers to compete amongst themselves ever more desperately as they become increasingly unable to afford exorbitant tuition fees.

The rich corporations take huge tax breaks then cry out for more H1B visas to employ lower pay foreign workers who's credentials mean even less than those in the USA and further drive the ROI of college investment down for local workers, when in reality, there never was a shortage of STEM workers. Now that the economy is crying the ROI of college is lower and it becomes apparent that the self taught billionaire drop-outs might be onto something. It's not that kids should drop out and expect to become rich, but instead that it's stupid to pay a college to teach them what they already know. They can start makin

Just because

[coofercat]

Just because you can write a mobile app, doesn't mean you should. I'm capable of it, but I don't because there's no point making another crappy version of $whatever. I'm not going to be as motivated as the other people already in the market, so so I'll 'fail'. Having an idea of yet another way to hoover up people's personal information isn't a guarantee of success - and actually most things like that require lots of marketing and other efforts, which have a high cost when you're yet to make any money.

However, all that said, it's a nice sideline, if you've got a good idea that's fun/interesting/useful/cute/timely. If it's something you can do without sacrificing your normal earning/studying time, or more of your savings than you can afford, then go for it - the cost of entry is pretty low, and it's kinda fun.

The best entrepreneurial advice I ever saw was "scratch your own itch". If you're not doing that, you'll get bored and either hate what you're doing, or more likely you'll just let it grow old without looking after it. Either of those outcomes means it's unlikely to be worth your time.

Be happy you failed so fast.

[Qbertino]

I now have almost $150,000 in debt, ruined credit, and no job prospects. What should I have done different?

Exited before stacking up 150k dept.

But that aside, try to stay on track. And don't waste your time. You can always make back money, you can not, however, make back time. Don't waste it. And when you start making the money back, getting of 150k gets easy very fast. Just don't *add* more dept, that would be my advice. Be glad you've got nothing to lose. ... Think outside the box.

Tim Ferriss "4 hour workweek" comes recomended as an inspirational book for you in your situation.

And hang in there. I've lost 8 jobs in 15 years, but I'm closing in on my sweet spot. ... And I'v just about paid all my depts. It works and it can be a fun adventure while you're doing it. You'll be at zero and in the plus faster than you'd think.

Good luck. Especially with the leasons learned.

Re:Be happy you failed so fast.

[Anonymous Coward]

I now have almost $150,000 in debt, ruined credit, and no job prospects. What should I have done different?

Exited before stacking up 150k dept.

But that aside, try to stay on track. And don't waste your time. You can always make back money, you can not, however, make back time. Don't waste it. And when you start making the money back, getting of 150k gets easy very fast. Just don't *add* more dept, that would be my advice. Be glad you've got nothing to lose. ... Think outside the box.

Tim Ferriss "4 hour workweek" comes recomended as an inspirational book for you in your situation.

And hang in there. I've lost 8 jobs in 15 years, but I'm closing in on my sweet spot. ... And I'v just about paid all my depts. It works and it can be a fun adventure while you're doing it. You'll be at zero and in the plus faster than you'd think.

Good luck. Especially with the leasons learned.

It is spelled "debt"

Re:Not enough jobs? I thought not enough candidate

[Pope]

Can I hire 5 with 5 years each? The math checks out, right?

Stay on Target!

[DarthVain]

I love how this sort of thing is always focused on the applications, the programmer, bad decisions, etc...

The focus should be on how this is all enabled in the first place, which is the crazy financial ponzi scheme which is wall street.

If you look at those glowing examples of success stories, and their details you start to see a few commonalities.

You get companies like Facebook going public to a valuation of like 100 BILLION dollars. Which EVERYONE even non-technophiles know is total horse shit, however spurs all sorts of folks trying to speculate on the stock, or trying to screw their neighbor. All these successes are only so much as their stock is worth. These these fictional companies, go and buy other startups using this inflated stock, creating more fictional successes with more inflated stock, ad nausum. Eventually people figure out that the stock is either worthless, or at the very least, not worth nearly what the snakeoil salesmen would have you believe. Then the bubble bursts, people lose everything, and the timer is reset. While hopefully the programmers managed to dump all their stock to believers prior to it being worthless. It isn't that these people had bad ideas, or products all the time, it is how they are funded, and the valuations and behavior of the stupid financial system. Get big enough and it gathers its own momentum from people just willing it to succeed, but will alone is not enough for the long term as any ponzi scheme will show. Those at the top do make out like bandits, however 95% end up being losers. Then again, probably how all Billionaires are born (unless they literally are born that way...)

Re:Please go to COLLEGE FIRST!

[shmlco]

You're right, it's much better to avoid being exposed to new ideas and experiences that might conflict with your own built-in biases and prejudices.

The parent post is *SO* accurate!

[King_TJ]

I'm constantly thinking of places where more software development is needed. The problem is, most of those places aren't the "sexy" ones. The kids in school are all about being the next video game coding superstar, which only makes sense when you consider they're raised on titles like Minecraft.

To be a successful developer right now, you almost need to run away from anything that's being hyped. If it smacks of "social networking" -- pretend you never saw that! Video gaming? Saturated ... avoid it.

Niches that aren't really being adequately addressed yet?

1. Home automation. Yes, there are complete "systems" on the high-end, but that's stuff that nobody but the very wealthy even bother with. The real money is going to be with inexpensive, mass-produced systems that "John Q. Public" can go out and buy, piecemeal, and build his own "smart home / apartment" with on a budget. This was basically done before with the X10 controllers, a couple decades ago. But that was all "pre Internet" and "pre wi-fi" -- yet they STILL sell some of it today, because there's nothing more modern that's roughly equivalent in price and functionality. The Nest thermostat and smoke alarm are, by most counts, big "hits" - yet they're just stand-alone smart devices that don't integrate into a whole! There's big money to be made if someone does all of this right ... maybe using Arduino gear as a base?

2. Automotive systems. The auto-makers are starting to show they have a clue about this stuff, at LAST ... but they're still in the early stages of really "getting it right", IMO. Cadillac has the CUE system now, while Ford outsourced to Microsoft (with rather mixed results). It's probably difficult to get a foot in the door with these places -- but maybe there's room for a 3rd. party to engineer replacement stereo systems that make serious improvements on the factory designs? I don't see why I can't, for example, buy a replacement stereo that has a custom plate on it so it's a direct fit replacement for a specific make/model of vehicle, instead of buying some "single DIN' or "double DIN" stereo and then paying $25 for a company like Metra to sell me a crappy plastic "dash kit" to make it fit -- and netting a result that looks like I yanked the factory radio out? The replacement should integrate with the vehicle's steering wheel controls, out of the box, and do everything the factory unit did. It should also be able to talk to the OBDII system in the car, showing me any vehicle fault codes on screen, letting me get a readout of things like the fuel-air mixture while I drive and more! Integrate a GPS and navigation system that actually works well, like Waze, and let people with cellular data connections submit updates in real-time! There's so much to do here!

Crab bucket .....

[King_TJ]

The primary reason you don't see the real upward mobility in America is primarily a function of the proverbial "crab bucket". If you're surrounded by people who lack the motivation to try to do more or to "rise above" the situation they're in, they tend to see you climbing past them and attempt to pull you back down to their level again -- just like a crab escaping a bucket full of crabs.

When you're the son or daughter of successful/wealthy parents, you already have higher expectations placed on you, as a rule. You probably live in a place where most of those you go to school with or have as friends are in a similar economic status. You don't want to be the "odd one out" in your peer group who doesn't maintain that same level of success, AND you're repeatedly told there's no reason you CAN'T maintain it.

Who you know will always be as important as what you know .... but many of the successful entrepreneurs I've read about don't appear to have been handed a "free success" ticket by their family members, even if those family members had the financial means to do it?

Dun goofed

[tepples]

You claim that choosing a platform with an exclusive gatekeeper is itself a mistake. So which set-top computing device with multiple gamepads, or which notable handheld computing device with a directional control and discrete buttons, lacks an exclusive gatekeeper? Or is a game concept that relies on a directional control and discrete buttons, as opposed to a mouse or touch screen, already a mistake?

Use the right metric!

[Anonymous Coward]

The relevant metric isn't, "How many people drop out of college, become programmers, and become filthy rich?" It's, "If I drop out of college, saving the costs of college and starting my lifetime earning stream now instead of later, will my total lifetime income minus college costs likely be higher in the 'dropout' scenario or the 'graduate' scenario?" Obviously this is still difficult to predict, but intuitively this measure of success is far more attainable than that of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.

Harvard is into propaganda now?

[Lockdev]

What a horrible article.

"possible consolation prize: perhaps these kids can parlay their programming skill into jobs at Facebook or Google."?

I didn't realize Twitter, Facebook, and Google were the only companies on the planet hiring software developers. You couldn't pay me enough to work for any of them.

Are the odds of making it in the overpopulated "app store world" against you? Sure.

Are all entrepreneurial app developers making mobile apps? No.

This article is typical "give up your dreams and work for the man" propaganda.

You know what sucks? Working 40+ hours a week and giving up the best years of your life for a crummy paycheck all in the name of making some silver-spooned douchebag even more rich.

I make 3x what I used to make working for the man. Know why? Because I did everything this article told me not to.

If you have a dream and the means to go for it, then by all means, do. You'd hate yourself at 40 years old, in a windowless cubicle, looking forward to your half hour god-awful commute and your one week vacation in 5 months, if you didn't at least give it a shot.

Re:$30 an hour is actually fantastic for these kid

[tlambert]

The problem is that this is still a "success story".

If the success story earns slightly above average, then you probably don't want to know what the average earnings are.

I'm somewhat confused. Yes, it's a success story; how is that a problem? How is it an example of the OP's thesis? How is it in any way applicable to the OP's thesis, given that his thesis involves college students, and these students were, at the time of their success, 2-3 years away from making a decision in that regard?

Learning to develop has never been cheaper

[SuperKendall]

Also, learning to develop is now very, very expensive.

Learning to develop has never been cheaper. You can get a whole set of videos on iOS programming from Stanford for free; apple makes the whole of it's developer content and all developer videos available for the $99/year developer program.

Looking wider, for any given language there are more resources than you can even use. I've learned many new languages and techniques long after leaving school.

But even the basics of a CS degree are covered by many online resources for free. You could learn the basics of algorithms very easily for free, and certainly be way ahead of most IT workers that do not bother to get even that rigorous an understanding of the fundamentals of programming.

If I were a kid I would skip college and work up a CS degree of my own, no question about it. I enjoyed school and I learned a lot, but the cost now does not justify what I would gain - especially from the ability to totally tailor my coursework.