I’ll tell you if five people can do the work of a 100 in about a year, when our latest (and the first of 100% own) product grows to that size. As for the previous ones built on the same Px100 platform, I can tell you, that one person (yours truly) can certainly do the work of 20 average IT programmers (not “code monkeys“) w/o breaking a sweat. I am in the process of training a few others to do that — armed with our tool, that does most of the heavy lifting.
The reason while it hasn’t translated into money yet (another entrepreneurial lesson learned) is doing work for others: projects instead of our own: products. It doesn’t matter whether you work for the man or a single client. You are selling your time, and your work is taken for granted with all of the excuses not to pay you. My partner and I learned this lesson the hard way. I don’t want to say “No” to people with ideas, but we’ll certainly ask for the money upfront in the future if we find the project worthy.
On the topic of corporate “communism”, I spent my childhood in the good old Soviet Union, and let me tell you after 21 years in the US, that Orwellian Gosplan with its eternal 120-rouble engineer salaries doesn’t come close to rigid American corporate salary grids and lack of career future. Thankfully there is a world outside that dying System here, in the US, albeit limited to a few narrow B2C niches: Google’s, Netflix’s, Uber’s, etc. I don;t want to idealize them. Like any big publicly owned company, Google is slowly becoming Oracle.
You’d also be thrilled to know, that the situation is much better in all previously “communistic” countries: e.g. Belarus, I lived in for the first 25 years of my life. Even their “bodyshops” are closer to Google culturally, than most American software companies. The friends I talk to over there, are genuinely surprised by American IT 70–90% project failure rates and non-technical people becoming managers.
Look, the System is dying. Don’t try to fix it. Start building your perfect world like the two Google founders did in 1998, when no VCs and other rich industry “influencers” listened to them. Good luck!
