Quote from: Sarthak on March 15, 2015, 07:15:48 AM

Quote from: Lorenzo on March 15, 2015, 07:02:56 AM

This question is inspired by this thread in the meta section.

Basically, it costs $1.5 million to hire 4 full-time programmers and a few additional outside contractors to code a forum script. The company in question charges a $100,000 monthly fee. This means that each coder is paid roughly $300,000-400,000.

Now I don't know much about web development/programming so I was surprised to see that the figure is so high but it turns out it's actually pretty standard in the industry and some websites pay even more than this. I'm sure it's not an easy job and writing a forum script from scratch is a complex task that requires good coding skills but I always assumed that they would get paid $50,000-150,000.

It also seems that someone who works in this industry could retire very early. After 10 years, they would have about $3 million so someone who enters the industry at age 25 could retire by 35 or even earlier. So do most web developers/programmers retire in their thirties?

They Have to work much! Maybe that's the reason!

True, but so do doctors, engineers, and scientists. And most of them get paid much less than $25,000 per month.

Quote from: Vod on March 15, 2015, 08:13:17 AM

Quote from: Lorenzo on March 15, 2015, 07:02:56 AM

Basically, it costs $1.5 million to hire 4 full-time programmers and a few additional outside contractors to code a forum script.

The basis of your logic is flawed. It does not cost that much money to hire 4 programmers. We'll never know why that much money was thrown at those guys, but I assume the purse holders didn't want to do due diligence or investigate other companies.

According to that thread, the company was recommended by a Litecoin dev named Warren:

Quote from: SaltySpitoon on March 09, 2015, 11:07:14 PM

They were recommended by Warren, the developer of Litecoin iirc.

And it's been stated numerous times in that thread that the $1-1.5 million price is actually pretty typical for these types of jobs:

Quote from: theymos on March 10, 2015, 01:07:58 AM

There are 4 full-time programmers working on it, plus some additional outside contractors. You might be surprised by the cost if you've never looked into this sort of thing before, but it's actually pretty standard for a group of this size...

...Huge corporations pay way more for this sort of thing. This isn't just any website. It's a very large and complicated computer program.

Quote from: Trillium on March 10, 2015, 11:52:15 AM

I worked for a small company and it took a long time to convince my superiors (inc. owner) how much web development costs. They eventually apologized after when they went around me only to find exactly the same figures. $1.5m+ is totally reasonable for a large development like I assume this new site would be.

Quote from: RedhatCAT on March 10, 2015, 12:29:10 AM

A million dollars (or even two million dollars) is really not a lot of money to be spending to build a piece of software that is used for a half million people, many of which conduct a lot of business on