Look Good w. B&G
Over the weekend I was asked why I am “critical” of developers. As someone who is obsessed with being better, doing better, and my own self-improvement, I am highly critical of myself. I strongly believe that each individual should aim to do better all of the time. What I see happen, though, is the opposite.
There are many anecdotes that highlight how software developers are guilty of not providing the best service they can, and underperforming on a consistent basis. I can tell you the story of a designer with no development experience, who was told by a dev that what she is asking for is too hard and would need weeks of development to accomplish, and so she went into the dev tools in her browser, made the changes, and sent them to the dev. I can tell you about being brought in to rescue a project to find that another dev had quoted a change to a WP site as “15 hours worth of work”, and how it took me about 2 hours to go through an unnecessarily massive chain of emails to figure out what the change was supposed to be, then 30 minutes to find that it was simply a matter of entering a single number in a text box on the backend. I can also tell you about the time a startup founder was quoted by a dev shop the amount of money they knew she would accept with a fine print that read, “Any items that falls outside of the scope would be charged $XXX/hr”, knowing fully well that the scope they quoted was only a fraction of the work, banking on the fact that she’d opt for the smaller proposal and then be able to take advantage of her once the contract is signed and the work started. I have a lot of stories of this kind. I do not keep a journal of them, because that would drive me mad, but sometimes I wish I could just name and shame.
I am critical of devs because I know the field is littered with incompetent, unprofessional people, who ruin the reputation of the many, many good folks out there doing a great job in an honest way. If you haven’t heard, Hertz is suing Accenture (https://twitter.com/ychaker/status/1121394581315182593) for what I believe is a symptom of exactly what I am most critical about. Not only does Accenture now become the poster child of what’s wrong in the tech service industry, sucking up large resources, while at the same time charging a lot more than those who are doing good work. I truly believe that B&G would have been able to do a much better job than Accenture, while at the same time only charging a fraction of what they did.
I’ve had conversations with an unfortunate number of founders who have invested their life savings into a product only to get back something that does not work or match the requirements provided. These founders are then stuck because they do not have the money to pay someone like me to rescue their project, and do not have a working product good enough to gain them customers or funding.
I am critical of devs because I know what quality work looks like, and I’ve seen entirely too much horrendous work. I know what those who do terrible work charge for that work. And I know the trickle down effects that it has on the startup ecosystem. Most importantly, I am critical because I want to push myself to attain a higher standard. I want to set the standard of service to be so much higher than what is currently the norm.
On the flip side, if we work with you, we will do our best to make you look good. Ultimately that’s our goal. We want to make the folks we partner with look good to others or those they report to. Recently, on a call with a client, a bunch of folks were arguing about how hard to execute on something the CEO asked for would be. While that was happening a member of the B&G team all but finished implementing the CEO’s request and then chimed in with “I’ll have it done in an hour.” We made our partner, who brought us into the project, look good in front of their client.
If you want to work with a team that will make you look good (to investors, shareholders, etc) and that will not nickel and dime you, B&G may just be the right fit for you. Shoot us an email and we’d love to talk to you.
