[Ilugc] Web UI framework

[Vamsee Kanakala]

Venkatraman S wrote:
> some more ponderings : for a product dev, would you consider hiring many cheap resources(read 'people/coders')  or few expensive resources.
>   

I'm always partial to the latter approach - especially for product 
development. I guess you can't really avoid hiring a lot of people when 
you are doing consulting as you need to expand as the clients grow.  As 
you expand, quality control becomes harder. But when you're doing 
product development, I really don't see the point of hiring a lot of 
developers. Hire a few good ones, and they'll do the work of many 
mediocre ones, only better.

Of course, hanging on to talent is hard, and you have to pamper them 
with lots of perks. But I guess that is par for the course, especially 
if you hope to make good money from the product (or have a really rich 
VC ;-).

This much is true - you can't mix a few good ones and a lot of mediocre 
ones and hope to make something out of it - the good ones will soon 
reach for the exits. I have seen this happen quite a few times, 
irrespective of the kind of software they are working on.

> When i mean cheap here , i am referring to technologies that are prevalent and expensive are those that are not often used. For eg. you may consider an analogy between hiring many JSP resources or few Rails (or JSF) resources. Which is a better option? 

You mean to say - should you go for "new and expensive" technologies 
like Rails (because of the dearth of programmers) or stick to tried and 
tested, where you don't have to pay as much, and find programmers aplenty.

Well, as they say, there are programmers who are easily 10x more 
productive than others. Mostly, they are not paid 10x more than others. 
I would say, find a few like those, pay them double the market rate, and 
you still got a good deal. I have worked at only one place which 
actually practiced something close to this, and I still remember it as 
an amazing place to work for (which didn't work ultimately because of 
the unwieldy technology, that's a related, but different story).

As for my current company, it's a one man army so far and the product is 
still in prototype stage, so I can't say I have applied all this. But 
with my experience gained till now, this is what I intend to follow.

> [ i dont want managerial answers :P ]
>   

Hope I didn't give any ;-).


V.