Chronicles of a diving, cabrating, humping programmer (part 2-3).

    The continuation of the story started here: http: //www.habrahabr.ru/blog/startup/13187.html

    Part 2. Gorka.

    So. We do the work, write all the garbage associated with our opensource project. By the way, at the moment I'm starting to understand that not all the time declared for work is needed to encode a program. How much exactly I still do not know exactly. No, of course I read Brooks, but who would believe some waste paper. Well, damn the bourgeois. You cannot describe our Slavic soul with bourgeois books. (Idiot. It's not about Brooks, but about myself :))
    In general, my friend once knocks on my ICQ and says: “If there is a bourgeois knocking on me and asks if I can do such and such a job. And I say nichrome I can’t, but I know one expert who can. Let me give him your contacts. ”So we get [b] FIRST BOURGEOISE PROJECT [/ b].
    No, you can imagine the difference in the standard of living here and there (or in the level of payments? ...) In short, what would I bargain for when I kiss the customer in the ass, I get it without any problems! We receive an order worth more than 1000 euros! Kick. I don’t know where to run. Here it is our finest hour !!! Come on, a project in which there is both PHP and C ++ and a database (a million new records per month. I know this now. Thank God that we had a friend who really rummaged through the database, otherwise I would have made him such a database, that she died after 2 weeks, but our good friend didn’t let me do it “faster”, but did it normally :) By the way, it was not muscle. )

    I will return to the newly bargained project. I make an assessment of 2 months.

    What to say. We did it for 8 months.

    In general, approximately 100 ye per month per person. I understand that I:
    - I don’t know how to make estimates by the timing
    - I don’t know how to give a damn at all and I must be scrapped.
    In short, depression. After continuous flash pianos a minuscule with a steam locomotive.

    The next "opa" (s). No FOOD.

    Okay, I’ve experienced depression not so much :)

    In general, here comes the next stage of my development as a programmer and an independent businessman.
    I [b] DO NOT PLAN TO PROJECT [/ b]

    Well. But nothing. I go online and then go to the store and buy MS Project for morons. (In principle, an exel would be enough, but the book contained clever words like PERT that are needed if you need to @ # $%. I’ll digress a bit. Recently there was a case when I was bargaining for a project. The customer was an intermediary. Another outsourcing office. And now I present my estimates in time. To me, a comrade from the office asks what the x№ is; and such terms. And I’ll give him the% I’ll use the PERT method and understand everything. The freak shut up (I don’t drive customers, but this one was freak :) In short, I understand that PERT is needed for orders, probably more than $ 1_000_000 or even more, but the word And tell me, I've counted in a fucking excel ....)
    In general, I begin to master MS Project, draw diagrams, etc., etc. Subsequently, it turns out that for projects up to 10_000ue exel and experience are enough. Maybe this will be enough for 100_000 ye, but I don’t know about it yet :)
    Now, I have gained new experience. Experience of projects @ # $ ^ ia projects. Not that the project would be constricted and we did not. No, we passed the test with honor. Yes, we did not earn money, but we did not earn a bad reputation. We passed the project and continue to work with customers, with new experience, with new prices, but we don’t look gang @ # $% mi. By the way, in addition to experience, this project gave us in the portfolio of a bourgeois customer.

    In general, this event made me reevaluate what I am doing again.

    The end of part number 2

    Part. 3. The three-headed snake is looking for friends.

    I will return to the very beginning of our work. The team united 3 people, on an equal footing. Those. decisions are made in concert with everyone. We are talking about political decisions, not programmer ones. Those. direction of our development, some conceptual questions. On the one hand, democracy is good; no one is offended. But on the other hand, everything is far from being so good and sooner or later one will be in favor, the other against, and the third will abstain. In general, a scheme in which there is no higher authority was supposed to lead to a conflict at some point, and I understood this from the very beginning, but I had no choice.
    I think each of the three of us considered (and considers) ourselves equal, but a little more equal than the others. In general, the conflict happened, some important decision was made without coordination with me. What kind of decision I don’t remember, probably, in fact, it was not so important :) Well, in general, I made a scene of jealousy with debriefing, etc. In the end, I let it go, the conflict was settled and everything returned to its normal course. The scheme of our work has not changed, the team has not broken up, but I am still convinced of the viciousness of such a scheme.

    Around the same time that the conflict occurred, I understand that there is a new problem. Sometimes I don’t know who is working now and who is not, and what the fighters are doing in general. We also expand the number of orders and have to invite comrades to help. These two events make you think about taking into account working time. Who works how much and whether at all. The search for software that allows you to take into account working time, the cost of time for employees and the cost of the same time for the customer begins. After sorting through a bunch of options, I dwell on this sandsurfer.sourceforge.net After finalizing the file, the program can perform all the necessary functions well.

    Now a little about how we invited new programmers to work. The situation is approximately the following: sometimes orders start to appear with which we do not have time to cope, but there is still no base that would allow us to fully hire a programmer for a monthly payment. What to do? We begin to ask smart students in recent years, friends, acquaintances, etc. on the subject of making a coven. The people responded little by little. We gave small work and watched who does what. In general, a handful of people passed through us, most of which were eliminated, but a couple of people remained with whom they began to work constantly.
    Speaking of students. There are potentially very smart students, they have a dofig of enthusiasm, fast brains and a good memory, but no experience. Working with them without close supervision leads to very funny results in writing code. Well, for example, put the optimization block (logically, a separate large entity) into the database class. And then call the optimizer functions for some reason from the BL class :) And it turns out like in that story about the scattered from Basseyannaya Street: “He ran to the cash register to buy a bottle of kvass.” In general, I had to prove for a long time that it was not necessary to mix fundamentally different things in one class.
    Then I learned another lesson: at the beginning of young fighters, you need to carefully monitor it and trust independent work only when you make sure that there are no blunders. It is most correct to do the design yourself, make stubs and ask these stubs to fill in with code.

    With the advent of new fighters, the end of sloppiness with money comes. At least normal accounting is needed. (It’s still a long way to planning. We depend too much on Fortune :)) Fortunately, there was a normal accountant and once every week or two I did all the postings. Those. over the course of a week, I accumulated checks and leaflets (a friend drove me 2 punch card drawers. convenient leaflets :)) with records of arrivals, expenses, etc., and the accountant normally executed this.
    The team was especially popular with monthly reports on the team's activities. Positive reports. Negative reports were not successful.

    At the same time, I am drawing a large table in Excel that would allow me to understand how much I should take from the customer if I have N founding fathers, M employees, P% downtime, S% taxes, all kinds of computer depreciation, office costs, etc. .d. Roughly speaking, it turns out that if we have three fathers, and we have three wage workers, a simple 30% of the time, an hour costs 7 ye, ZP of workers 600 ye fathers have ~ 980 ye ... But not everything is so simple ... Sometimes downtime was cooler than 30 % :)

    End of Part 3

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