£500 gets you a sit down meeting and a website design drawn in crayon on a napkin.
While we’re there, we can also talk about the cost for website development and why you shouldn’t talk to dad about websites ever again.
Like bro that’s not even a full day of work how much do you think I make?
£500*5*52 = £130,000, or ~163,000 USD as of writing
I’m guessing you’re in America?
Should be at least double in the US since it would be consultancy work which brings higher taxes (1099 vs W2) and no benefits. A $500 full day consultation is super cheap.
Geez… Project managers are forbidden from making work estimates- they only get to collect them.
They don’t get to argue estimates either. They can ask questions to gain understanding but the estimates are the estimates.
Wearing an architect or chief engineer hat is sometimes more fun because you get to call bullshit on dumb estimates like “4 to 5 weeks to model a table with 7 fields, with 2 of them being PK, FK” like GTFO we can model it in the next 5 minutes if I talk slowly.
Based on this interaction alone and his dad deciding the price for him, I’m going to make the wildly assumptious assumption this is a 20s/30s(/40s?) unemploymed guy living at his dad’s house rent free.
If my assumptions are incorrect, sorry mate, you did not win the dad lottery.
I like to put my estimates in writing somehow.
“My initial and unbiased estimate is 3 months.” Put it in an email, nothing will ever change the fact that my initial estimate was 3 months.
I’ve had PM’s complain that our estimates don’t fit into their plan.
I just walked away.
If the timing is critical then the only reasonable solution is to cut scope and features until it fits.
The triangle isn’t a rubbery floppy thing, it is iron!
They fully subscribed to the mythical man month. So they just threw bodies at it and then couldn’t understand why the project got slower.
I don’t understand your statement. The Mythical Man Month teaches exactly that lesson of more bodies != Faster in many cases.
How long to build the site with 1 full stack dev? 1.5 years.
How long with an existing high performance team of 5? 2 months.
How long if you hire 4 plus the one original (all qualified)? 1 to 1.5 years.
How long if we hire 30 full stack devs? Maybe never.
Poorly worded on my part.
They fully bought into the idea of the man-month without realising it was mythical.
You know? I literally figured that out a minute before I saw your reply. And I rolled my eyes at myself.
That makes sense. Silly me
Cheers
I’m still not sure exactly what Project Managers do. I’ve seen countless job postings and even stories from people claiming to have been one. Yet, more often than not they get shit on, and memes often have a kernel of truth. #ConfusedHumanPerson
Yet when I have a good one versus a bad one I can definitely tell the difference.
Many roles main responsibility is to report upwards what happens in"the basement". Which includes translating what one person says into that the other can understand. Then there’s roles that do it both ways.
If there’s time to spare, a good project manager can also bring health and common sense to the team they’re part of. That takes pointing out non sense both inside and outside the team, and the hardest part - being constructive about it.
So essentially taking complex ideas or situations and breaking them down a’la eli5 style to the suits and other personnel that may not otherwise understand. At the same time in other situations or roles, taking expectations and directives from higher up and breaking them down so they’re digestible and workable.
Man, these job descriptions really makes it sound like you’re going to be doing incredibly complicated and potentially invasive team-to-team tasks. When in reality you’re trying to get a bunch of cats to work together without slapping one another.
They are supposed to be the glue that binds the internal team together as well as bonding to external groups.
The project manager organises external requirements and steers the project in the direction needed for the business. That direction might change depending on the status of other projects, it’s their job to be on top of that.
They also report progress and roadblocks upstream so that those who manage groups of related projects can work on keeping everything running.
Whether they’re actually competent, well that’s something else entirely.
Exactly this. You don’t realize how useful they are until you’ve had a good one. The amount of BS from other teams they can shield you from can make focusing on your own job so much easier.
Unfortunately the ratio of good to bad PMs leaves a lot to be desired.
Good ones are pretty rare and good program managers are even rarer.
What they should do, and what most actually do, are different things.
Project managers must be great with humans and communication. If they are not, then they just can’t be effective.
My dad asked me if I could build a site for him. I tried, but ultimately didn’t have the chops (I can customize Wordpress, but this was supposed to be from scratch and I didn’t keep up when things like CSS came into being; old). I sent him to hire an outside party.
Here’s the thing: he wanted his menus vertical on the left side. I told him that’s not how it should be done; they should be at the top. But he was adamant. Later, he told me that his web consultant shop had also said the same. It’s the only time he ever said, “you were right,” about anything like in my entire life. Not that he was an asshole (though he really was when I was growing up). It’s just not something he said. And no one can take that from me. I even called my mom and told her.
And now… Lots of websites with menus on the left!
Still, happy for you that your dad could humble himself to you. That’s really hard for some people, even when they’d like to, it’s like your brain just won’t compute how to say it without coming out wrong so you never say it.
Lots of websites with menus on the left!
Can you send an example? I’ve only seen these foldout side bar menus.
YouTube, google drive, Any readthedocs site with more than 1 page
Well, the youtube menu is most likely positioned there because they dont want people to use it.
I’m looking at a page right now that has some buttons for “Subscribe, Create a post, Block community” on the side. But I guess it’s on the right side and maybe since they’re buttons it doesn’t count as a menu.
To be fair, those are less a nav bar and more contextual content. You likely also have the main nav bar along the top.
Every site in the early 2000s had a left nav menu
Wikipedia, especially the new design with the table of contents in the sidebar.
Here’s some articles written about it as well from NN group if you’re interested
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/vertical-nav/
Here’s an article on user attention on website predominantly leaning left as well as a related topic
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/horizontal-attention-leans-left/
Lemmy Frontend called Photon:
Your dad is right. On desktop, navigation is on the left. On tablet, you shrink it to a rail. On mobile it should be a dismissible nav drawer.
The top menus, especially the flyover(on mouse hover), are bad for accessibility because they convert a non-committal action (hover) to a context changing one (focus). It’s a uniquely web-only invention and thankfully falling out of usage. (Unless you mean menubar/toolbar. Those are fine but extremely rare on Web.)
I don’t get it.
We have only 1080px in vertical, part of which is also used for Taskbars, titlebars and toolbars in most cases. Then there is this trend of sites not using most of the horizontal space for main body text.
So, what reason do we have to not use the wasted side-space and instead congest the already low vertical space?I would understand if it were a mobile-only site or if you were explicitly talking about the vertical version of it, but even for 4:3, I won’t consider a sidebar to be a bad idea, unless perhaps, it was German.
He was probably expecting a finder’s fee too
Non-technical project managers are the worst lol
I think it depends. I’ve had a non-technical PM and he was great. He knew he knew nothing about development and as such did what great managers do, create an environment where we could work as efficiently as we could. If we said it takes X amount of time he wouldn’t try to squeeze out a faster deadline, he’d report “it will take X amount of time”. If we said it’s unreasonably to take feature Y in he’d say we’re not going to take feature Y in.
IMO it’s much harder with PMs who did some development 20 years ago and “know how things are done”. The ones with some technical knowledge almost always butt in.
I still think about how the project manager, the wife of the CEO, told me the icon she wants me to replace is about 2 inches, on a 17-inch monitor.
Wait. Technical project managers exist?
For the first year or so they become PMs they try.
Being a salesman must be so easy. Scam the customer, scam the people actually putting the thing together, scam the business itself
The United Scams of Assholes.
The scummy sales person is a stereotype. They exist sure but if you’ve ever worked with a good one they can really help particularly if you’re buying something complex. I used to work for a company that sold complex manufacturing equipment and without a salesperson theres no way most customers would know what they needed to maintain it etc.
Technical Sales Vs Sales
One’s an engineer with something to sell. The other is a grifter.
As an engineer i hate both, technical sales never have an understanding of their product and are never able to answer any of my questions (because i’ve read through the datasheet as their words are meaningless to me) but they are mooooorrrreee than happy to schedule an in person meeting to come to my office and show me their product line.
Tell me what i want to know or find me someone who can, im not going to buy 10,000 of whetever if i cant even determine if they will work for my use case.
The last time i had to deal with one of these assholes it took 3 phone calls and 2 emails to get a simple answer which wasnt in their datasheet, which was all of one page long.
My favorite experience with technical sales is we had these component guys come in, they had openned up our product and wanted to show how much better their “equivalent” components were (genuinely a great idea), but they had no context as to what the components were being used for so they all fell flat.
In my experience both are only a waste of my time.
It’s been my experience as well, especially in the web space (I’m not a web person), but everywhere else too.
Sometimes I like to chat up sales people if I must, just to see if I get anything interesting out of them, but usually I end up annoyed and bored at their hustle because they’re just saying whatever they think I want to hear, and don’t really know anything of substance about what they’re pushing.
When my dad and uncle wanted a website done and thought I could do it (again, not a web person) because I was their “computer guy”, we ended up trying one of those “Let our expert team get you going!” services pushed by a hoster. (Fatcow, in this case, may they burn if they’re still around.)
The sales guy had us thinking we’d be in business sooner than later. They’d have it handled. They were pros. Awesome! I could learn a little bit about managing all this while they’d get my non-technical family set up with the hard parts to start their venture.
…The result was a lackluster, barebones Wordpress site. There was no consulting or advice, no educating about how the web worked or how things are usually done. Weird hacky custom code for everything from video uploading to payment processing.
Zero design went into this and the best part of it was the logo, which my uncle hired a freelancing college student to do.
All my family got was some number that connected to a very annoyed team in India who just wanted to connect your request to whatever was closest on their menu and charge you a few hundred up front for it. They just assumed you knew exactly what you wanted and would bill by the hour to write some ugly custom JavaScript / PHP. (Man, if they just implemented existing plugins it would have been better…)
They wanted to charge a ridiculous fee for adding an SSL, and basically shrugged me off when I called to ask how to do it myself, after we all agreed this was for an e-commerce purpose in the first place.
The website never truly went live, they got a lot of money, and the only $20 we “made” was from testing the checkout function.
The consequences of this are why, to this day, I just teach myself enough to do whatever it is I want to do. The only difference between a good salesman and a bad one, is that the “good ones” are simply clever enough to evade your bullshit detector.
The whole game is to make you think you’re hiring some friendly pro who’s got it all covered, but in the end you were better off doing it yourself anyway.
I was a naive teenager who lacked ability, just trying to help out my family. I still feel guilty to this day.
lol
Later after you turn down this very generous offer.
„How can you bring such shame to me, ive already told him you’ll do it”
Some decade and change ago I used to sell people Drupal installs at £200 a pop. They’d get a pretty secure codebase, the ability to add content through a gui and if necessary have customer accounts.
Pretty much what killed it as a business was everyone expected to be on the first page of Google because business advisers were telling them that sitebuilders should do SEO as standard.
ironically this is what killed google, every shitty business or bad website wants to game the system to be on the first page
Cool
Could be easy money
Might be an afternoon of CSS, or might be 2+ weeks of React
Even just an afternoon of CSS would mean 2-4 hours, plus setting everything up, plus talking to the client, revisions, etc. You’ll quickly end up with 10h overall, even if the actual task is rather small. And that’s the optimistic case.
So you’ll end up with maybe 50€/h , probably more like 30. Not terrible, but that’s the optimistic case.
Square space template give him the login and done
Don’t forget that 500 dollars entitles them to 24/7 on call for life and 7 9s of uptime.
Could be a “You can’t let John down now, we’re old pals, and a few people expect the site to work by the end of the week. He just needs a site like Facebook, but for gardeners”
I got something similar in a requirement specification once:
“Resolution supported: Max” “OS support: The latest one”
🤦🏼
Client be like
/jkI literally got the description “make it look cool” in my current project.
We all know the context and can roughly guess what it means, but still…
Stuff like this is part of why I dropped out of multimedia production in college, I only enjoy that stuff as a hobby for myself, doing it for other people is a creative nightmare lol
make it look cool
Got it. Animated background, GIFs, HTML 4.01 frames, marquee, privacy-friendly ads which are just GIFs linking to other websites. Did I go too far with the last one?
Why so fancy? Sites like this are famous with millions of views: https://web.archive.org/web/20041229194455/http://www.ikissyou.org/indeks2.html
I like sex
I like money
That sounds fucking awesome.
I used to have one like that, only with more tables (using the default border, of course).
It what’s later became known a “programmer design”.
All wintery themes too as that is the coolest season.
Every time I click on this link I listen to all the cymbal tracks
Finally, all that time making the coolest myspace profile pays off!
"OS support: The latest one” is not that bad of an requirement…
If they complain like “why doesn’t this work on Windows Vista, on IE8” - you can just point to the specs and say you only support the latest OS.
So basically you only support the latest Nightly Build of Ubuntu, since that’s the current latest OS
You don’t even need to support anything older than the last windows hot fix with requirements like that.
Why support windows when you can argue that linux has a newer OS?
I am humbled by your chess of many D’s.
I mean, I’d contact the guy and say upfront what 500 quid will get him.
But I appreciate the PM joke.
If he was serious, your dad seems like a prick that sees you as an appendage that he owns…
This seems as good an opportunity as any to tell him to go fuck himself and learn some boundaries - not sure if you need to hear this, but blood doesn’t get a pass just for being blood. Make ALL the people in your life earn their place there by treating you decently.
Woah buddy, you’re at about a 9, we need you down at a 3.
“Dad” doesn’t know anything about web design, but he knows (presumably son) makes them, and he ballparked a number making the entirely common armature mistake of thinking it’s as easy as setting up your facebook page. He’s also not demanding anything here. Nothing about this exchange suggests that “Dad” was going to require that the work be done at the stated price. It seemed like
Maybe before you go burning bridges and obliterating a family relation, consider how much easier it is to tell “Dad’s Buddy” that while Dad was well meaning, he was way off, and Buddy is free to compare with other estimates, but $X is actually a much more reasonable value.
You’re not, OP…
also, feels pretty obvious you haven’t been involved in bidding jobs before - these initial numbers set expectations. If “dad” valued the kid’s talent and time, he would have said, “they’ll give you a number” and/or the message to kid would not have been closed, it would have been open. So instead of, “you’ll do this, thanks bye” it would be a question to kid prior saying, “I know a lot goes into your work, is $500 a good ballpark to give my friend for something like this?”
It’s about expectations and entitlement - you’re essentially my property, so I decided it would be this is indicative of a problem with “dad’s” approach.
Neither is op. This meme is old enough to vote.
Would you think the same if the dad had told his buddy “500k € for the website”?
I would take the $500 upfront and just log in to Squarespace or whatever website building service there is, do a simple design, tell him he needs to pay this subscription, argue with him and dad why there must be monthly or annual fees and they could have done this themselves for cheaper, whichever way they chose to pay the subscription or not I still get $500 for 2 hours work and the knowledge my father won’t bother me again with website designs
This is the way.
Chances are this is a kid or NEET and all his friend wants is a super simple website with basic info for his local business. Dad is either doing him a favor, or giving him some pocket change so he’ll stop bothering him for money for a month. This is what happens when you don’t teach your children to be adults, and give them everything instead. Seen it too many times.
For $500 I’d slap together some fitting WordPress stuff to suit their subject matter and teach them about domain registry and hosting. Then I’d tell them to come back to me with more if they’re interested in any specific features they’re not interested in implementing themselves later.
$500 is worth a little bit of work and I can give them a product that’s as aimless as their ambition for it. They certainly can’t get more than they’re asking for if they don’t know what to ask for.
