As a software engineer with experience doing web development, I hear a lot of people with ideas for hot new websites. In most of these situations where there's an idea looking for someone to implement it, I get the sense that the software engineer's point of view isn't understood. Here's my edited response to a request for someone with spare time to implement an idea that was described at the level of detail of requiring community features and that users be able to upload content:
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Let me start by saying that I think it's great that neat opportunities for web developers are posted on this list. Keep 'em coming! But as a software engineer I tend to have reservations about "I have an idea; now I need an
engineer" type requests, so I thought I'd lay out my thought process here for the benefit of everyone. Before I start, a caveat: I may not be representative of all web developers; I believe there are websites where you can go to post a job description and have someone remotely code your site for you, but I'm not the sort of engineer that looks for jobs there, so please take what I have to say with this in mind.
First question I usually have is "what's the idea?" I have a mountain of ideas to implement whenever I find the time and inclination, so an overly vague description is unlikely to get me interested. Of course I understand the desire to protect your idea, but for me at least, the description has to be more of a sales pitch than a "need handyman to build 4'x6' doghouse"-style ad in the paper.
The secrecy also raises a big red flag for me. I think: he's protecting the idea, so he's in love with it, and without any detail on his background, I have to assume that the idea person ("Idea" from now on) is non-technical.
From that combination I conclude that I'll have to do more work than Idea realizes and thus suggests, Idea will be frustrated by the slow rate of progess relative to his expectations, AND Idea will believe that the idea is worth at least as much as my implementation (which is taking so damn long!), so he'll be unwilling to give up an appropriate amount of equity/cash. All of these conclusions might be wrong. Idea might be a PhD in CS who got an MBA, now works at a nice consulting firm, and just wants to do this idea on the side but doesn't have time to code it himself. But I need to hear this up front, otherwise I assume the worst (described above) and nothing is going to get me to play a role in that sad story.
After that initial stuff is out of the way, I'm curious what I can expect from this project. Is it going to be fun from a technical standpoint? Web development involves a lot of mindless drudgery, particularly when it comes to tweaking the visual aspects of a website. So either the idea should be so exciting that I won't mind that stuff, there should be a graphic designer taking care of front-end details, or the financial prospects have to be good enough that I can slog through it (but this option is probably not the most preferable). Which brings me to...
What's it going to pay? I'm not necessarily interested in exact dollars, but more, what sort of cash-equity combination is it. If it's all cash, this might be the sort of job for one of those rent-a-coder websites; if it's all equity, then how will my equity compare to Idea's? If it's not all one or the other, what sort of mix is it (and I'm still interested in how my proportion compares to Idea's)? If the equity is significant (and it probably should be to get our interests aligned) then sell me on the business merits. I've already got a fancy piece of paper entitling me to thousands of shares in a tech-startup, so if you want to sell me another, it had better be even fancier (I'm joking :P) or I also need to be convinced that yours will be worth the ink it's printed with.
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Hopefully that gave you a peek into the software engineer's perspective on ideas needing an engineer, because propositions that take this perspective into account are way more likely to get my attention (and other engineers too I'd guess). It probably sounded one-sided, because I'm sure I'm biased here. I understand that we engineer's need business people too; there are plenty of business administration tasks that I'm sure I'd find even less interesting than making the corners on some box render correctly across all the browsers out there. So good luck with whatever idea you're pursuing!
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