• KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Ongoing maintenance is literally part of system upkeep. You don’t include that in R&D costs. That’s akin to including power as a R&D cost.

    Total staff involved in development? IIRC that wasn’t your original question, I believe you said something like “total users” or “total staff” in a way that could very easily be read as “how many people are involved today” which is a very different question.

    Software development would obviously be included in the R&D cost, while total staff running the system after development would absolutely not be.

    Why didn’t I provide information on the project? Because it would be so generalized due to NDA that it wouldn’t be useful. Here, let’s give it a go: The project in question was for a corporation with around half a million users. Serving internal applications to a large number of device types, though admittedly piggybacking on some external infrastructure since OS’s like iOS explicitly disallow self signing applications.

    Admittedly, this pales in comparison to the PlayStore which is installed on billions of devices, though you won’t find many who have worked on something scaled that massive.

    Did that explanation help? No of course not, because it provided so little information that it’s all but useless. It also doesn’t actually show that I know what I’m talking about. How was I involved? Was I a useful worker? How long was I part of the project?

    Your question is just a long winded way of asking what I already did.

    • papertowels
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      1 year ago

      Ah, I was referring to maintenance as in the software development you need to do to maintain a competitive service for 15 years. Something like Google play wasn’t just “set it and forget it”, it’s continually been updated. That falls under r&d.

      No, I just meant how many software engineers you had working under you. I’m barely transitioning from doing pure development to also being in charge of managing some projects, and the one thing I learned on this end is that engineers are expensive :)

      That’s actually hugely helpful! It’s a wide customer base, and there are multiple device types. That’s pretty big! Folks now know that you at least have dealt with something in a similar vein as the Google play store. Are you allowed to say if it was spun up internally or vendor provided?

      Even though you could have answered your own question with this, here’s what I believe the difference lies: did you feel like I was gatekeeping you when I asked for more details about your experience?