Colombian entrepreneur Alex Torrenegra hired a small team of developers and for 90 days, they worked every waking moment, and except for one family weekend break, they did not leave the house. Food and other logistics was taken care of by another company. Here he tells how productive the experience was.
Hopefully helpful critique regarding the business itself:<p>1. I'm not sure about Americans, but "lodging" translates very poorly for this Canadian. It's not that I don't understand it, it's just that people don't really use the word here. "Rooms" or "Beds" would be a better bet.<p>2. I'm questioning why I as a traveller would bother to "bid" on a room that I may know nothing about. Seems like a win for the hotelier, but a lose for me. I can stay at a hostel or hotel chain and have a reasonable expectation of what to expect. I can't do that at a B&B, but I can compare prices to get an idea of what would be up scale and what would be bargain basement. This site disables that, and brags about it. I really don't need to save $5 that badly.<p>About the process:<p>I think - humbly - that sometimes us geeks can get so caught up in the process of how we're building something that we lose sight of what it is we're actually building. This doesn't matter when you're making lego structures as a hobby, but it's completely relevant when you're trying to design a business.<p>How you do it is - in the end - largely irrelevant. Yes you can argue about productivity or the best way to get the most hours out of a day, but extremes aside it is not going to be what matters to your customer. I don't care if you used agile and got your product up in 10 hours or if it was a disastrous waterfall plan that needed to be redrawn 6 times and took 6 years to complete. I care about the product, and what it can do for me.<p>In this case (and I mean this respectfully) I get the impression that the process was the focus and the product was the afterthought. There's nothing wrong with that specifically, but it certainly shows through.
All that work on the backend and, sadly, the lack of time put into the landing page will make it all for naught.<p>* 7 steps? Why would I want to be involved in something that complex? 3-4 steps max.<p>* 11 benefits? I'm not going to read or be able to process all that. 3 max, give me something I can quickly understand and tell friends about.<p>* That screenshot has got to go. Looks amateur at best.
Erm... Doing 27'000 hours of development in private, without any customers beta-testing early versions of the site, seems completely insane. Why would you ever do that? I mean, if you really don't have a choice at all, because the project is that big, then fair enough (but in that case, don't do this as your first start-up - do it later when you have access to funds and people).<p>Imho the CTO/CEO of this start-up should have figured out a way to get something out there and test the concept for at most 1/10th of that cost. Much smarter, and cheaper, than trying to cram developers like chickens in a coop.
From the benefits on the job description page:<p><a href="http://alexander.letmego.com/2009/01/29/very-special-90-day-job-opportunity/" rel="nofollow">http://alexander.letmego.com/2009/01/29/very-special-90-day-...</a><p>I see no mention of exercise, and:<p>* Unlimited food and beverages, including of course Red Bull and coffee.<p>* <i>If interested</i>, we will offer you healthy and balanced food. <i>(emphasis mine)</i><p>I have to wonder how productivity would be affected if they offered an environment just as immersive, but a bit more focused on health. Healthy mind in healthy body, right? I don't think I could last more than a couple of weeks.
So basically, you screwed up your scheduling, your project management and your resource allocation. As a last ditch effort to save the project you created a sweatshop and bandied it around under the euphemism of "immersion".<p>Instead of taking personal responsibility for entrepreneurial, management, and financial shortcomings, you've degraded people's health and sanity.<p>Going so far as to mock these people who built your product by showing before and after pictures of them in a state of decline and then presenting that to us as "humor" is a bit much.<p>I'm insulted and ashamed at the way this operation was carried out. Hacker News is supposed to be a community of the forward thinking, not those who wish to revert to the abuses of the industrial era.
Add a few staged infights and you pretty much have Hacker Big Brother meets Shattered (reality TV show where participants didn't sleep for a week), with a dash of Apprentice (you'd have to throw out a coder after each week), Dragons' Den (have nice closeups of bad feature pitches) & even Startup.com.<p>God, Channel 4'd be all over this. I'd best pitch the idea to them quick!
I don't want to be that "this would take a weekend!" guy, but 27,000 hours? There must be some hidden complexity somewhere. Excited to try out the product though, sounds like a great idea.
A little off topic but: Colombia as in the country? It seems the company is based off the New York area but all the names/faces look Colombian. Is the dev team located in Colombia?<p>Just curious since this is the first time I've heard of a "Colombian startup".
So were requirements, design, coding, debugging and testing all crammed into this 90 days?<p>I'm guessing that system is going to be very difficult to maintain. You need some downtime for designs to settle in your mind and to be sure that it's going to work.<p>If you're going 24/7 for 90 days, I expect the design to be poor, the code to be hacked/patched, the bug count per loc to be very high and the test coverage to be minimal.
I really question the productivity measures used in this article. All time in front of a monitor is not equal. Sure they tripled the amount of time they were at their desk -- how did it impact the quality of the code, the abstractions used, the overall design, etc.<p>I know that after some really long days, I look back at what I wrote and am like WTF did I do.
There is no partial payment plan for those who quit or get fired before day 90 of coding is reached.<p>Wonder what the reason is to load the last payment and underpay on the first 2, more pressure to push to complete the project at the end?
"...we are pleased to note that there were no fatalities due to programmer-on-programmer violence..."<p>Good thing you used a framework. Who knows what would have happened if you didn't.
This is nothing to be proud of.
I'm surprised they are willing to broadcast that they:
- we're able to convince some amateur developers to work slave camp hours
- didn't hit the goal
- on top of these two, they spent 3x what they normally do.<p>I can't see <a href="http://about.letmego.com/letmego/content/career_opportunities" rel="nofollow">http://about.letmego.com/letmego/content/career_opportunitie...</a> getting many visits.<p>Just my opinion of course. What would the inverse of this scenario be? A start-up that has remote workers and saves 3x the amount of money of keeping everyone in one spot, has flex hours, and hits the targets.<p>That would be something worth blogging about.
I'm not sure this is ethical or sane. In Europe we have working time regulations and that is for a good reason.<p>Seems to be another attempt to justify start-up whipping tactics to cash in quick rather than build a well-backed product with staff who won't hate you.
"The Results:<p>We didn’t reach the beta milestone completely, but we were able to release a limited beta version of the site. We are still developing some of LetMeGo’s traveler-focused features.<p>We found that the productivity of the team was also three times higher than usual. For those of you familiar with RescueTime, the tool we used, we measure productivity by multiplying average efficiency per week times the tracked time worked per week.<p>Productivity = Average Efficiency * Work Time<p>Productivity Working as Usual = 1.22 x 30.9h/week = 37.7/week<p>Productivity at the LetMeGo Immersion = 1.53 x 73.8h/week = 112.91/week<p>Ratio: 1:2.99<p>Given that the productivity and the cost increased side by side, we can then conclude that the biggest benefits is that we saved seven months of development. If it wasn’t for the Immersion, a limited beta of LetMeGo would have not been released yet and the full site would have not been launched until the second quarter of 2010."