Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | th3byrdm4n's commentslogin

Isolation might also prove to have some staying power.


It's lowering the bar for developers to enter the marketplace, in a space that is wildly under saturated. We'll all be fine. There's tons of software to be built.

More small businesses will be able to punch-up with LLMs tearing down walled gardens that were reserved for those with capital to spend on lawyers, consultants and software engineering excellence.

It's doing the same thing as StackOverflow -- hard problems aren't going away, they're becoming more esoteric.

If you're at the edge, you're not going anywhere.

If you're in the middle, you're going to have a lot more opportunities because your throughput should jump significantly so your ROI for mom and pop shops finally pencils.

Just be sure you actually ship and you'll be fine.


Honestly, I've developers saying the same thing about IDEs and high level languages.

This new generation of tools add efficiency the same way IntelliJ added efficiency on top of Eclipse which added efficiency on top of Emacs/VI/Notepad/etc.

The more time that someone can focus on the systemsit takes certain types of high-time, [not domain problem specific] skill processes and obfuscated it away so the developer can focus on the most critical aspects of the software.

Yes, sometimes generators do the wrong thing, but it's usually obvious/quick to correct.

Cost of occasional correction is much less than the time to scaffold every punchcard.


Don’t build it to sell - explicitly. Build it to solve your business problem and tell the guy building it “after we’ve separated ourselves from our competitors and we’ll either declare our company a software company that does logistics, or we’ll set an environment for you to pitch the sale of the software to competitors”

A startup mindset is importantly for the first hires, but selling software is an aspiration not a requirement.

That aspiration can be distracting from simpler business problem solving solutions too, so be clear “new codebase” when we are ready to sell…

Shortcuts for us, no shortcuts on the software resell company.


This summarizes my career nicely.

Great advice IMO.


This summarizes my career nicely.

Great approach advice IMO.


I think he’s toeing the line of “listen build it yourself but you’re missing a decade of expertise I can add to your stack tomorrow”

That said, my feeling is the guy doesn’t have a prebuilt fit for his company / he’s already shopped extensively.


Second this. Cross functional knowledge is the secret sauce of in-house designed software.

Nothing off the shelf does that.

Integration is where cross departmental solutions live and that’s an underrated nightmare


Third this. If the software team (at least the lead) does not know the business requirements, you are not doing in-house development. Otherwise, it is just equivalent to off shore development, that happens to sit in the same building as yourself.


Fourth this.

Other than making sure you find the right person/people from a raw skills+personality/capability perspective, it's the next most critical item.


I have a fully staffed team it’s not 5m a year. For a company twice his size.

These are very generous consultant pitch #s not reality. We doubled running 1-$200k/guy … 2x full stack devs (me) 2x data guys 1x MSP for IT.

That team was awesome and did serious buzz saw damage because we shipped solutions that made the company better every day.

Didn’t have to be huge. Just help someone do something better.


> I have a fully staffed team it’s not 5m a year. For a company twice his size.

I don't think the numbers OP chose really matter. The point is to do the exercise. Try and work out some numbers on how much the current software is costing, how much room there is for improvement and how much investment it will take to get there. Add a big margin to account for all the uncertainty with building something out.

If the numbers still work out significantly in favour of writing your own software then it may be a project worth considering.


What does on-call look like for you?


Most business do not require on call for their internal tools


Depending on the area of logistics OP is in, it's not unlikely that he'd need on-call engineers for his logistics management system. Blockages in supply chain can be extremely expensive.


At my company, downtime is approximately $50k/hr in a 24/7 environment for manufacturing and logistics. We're ALL on call.


It was brutal, but the mentality was - it's brutal now but you have the power to fix it, so engineering hours went into fixing broken windows.

That adopted mentality pays off tech debt fast.


Sure; but eventually you've got a bus number problem and a "I want to be able to take a vacation and I want my coworkers to be able to take a vacation" problem, and that requires more people.

At least that's how I feel about team sizes.


My caution is at the end of working with free lancers you have no technical retention.

My company worked with freelancers/consultants for years, it just delayed the inevitable. You need to start building your in house team.

Find the ONE. See if he can build anything on their own. If they can/thinking is good, then scaling with freelancers seems good because you retain knowledge and long-term vision/oversight.


That's the whole point - at this point they don't know if they want to build out a full team. Start small and measure progress, you can always add permanent employees along the way. (We did this too)


Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: