Brent Simmons writes beautifully about a frustration that most indie software developers can relate to: the payoff proposition. He highlights the all-too-common scenario where a user offers a cash bounty, $50 for instance, to add a particular feature: “The developers I know would rather rip up $50 bills, long sequences of them, than do something that, in their best judgment, is against the best interests of the software and its users.” This reminds me of a listener question from a soon-to-be-released episode of Core Intuition , the podcast I do with Manton Reece . The question asks, roughly, “how can managers who don’t code relate better to their programmer employees?” Non-coder managers and customers have a lot in common: they have a great vision for the future of a product, with little understanding of the work it will take to get there.
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The Payoff Proposition
