70K is the median programmer income in the US. (Based on a very thorough let's look at the first thing Google regurgitates!)

It should have been enough to fund a business analyst and an app developer for a few months. Plus Shadow Inc's overhead + profit.

It's absolutely bonkers how shitty the industry is. A kid can throw together an app in a few days, but somehow 60K USD is not enough.

That said I work in "consulting", I know how fast time, money, billable hours can be burned through, when there's no real drive, motivation, vision and delegation of responsibilities and control.

There's no way 60k can pay for multiple people for a few months: your 60k median excludes overheads, insurance, etc.

To be honest, I'm not sure if that a few people for a few months is even enough to avoid something like this from happening: this is crazy stress launch in gymnasiums with very high device variety. It probably demands a couple months just of serious dedicated QA and dry runs if you really wanted to avoid this outcome.

They hired a lot of fresh devs from bootcamps if you checked the company page on LinkedIn. I would not be shocked if they really were that cheap.

Sure, the point isn't that it isn't possible to have an app created for that price, the point is that at that price you can only create an app that leaves a solid risk of exactly what happened.

> 70K is the median programmer income in the US. (Based on a very thorough let's look at the first thing Google regurgitates!)

BLS, which while not perfect has far better data than most other sources trying to do this independently, says $84,280 in 2018.

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

> It should have been enough to fund a business analyst and an app developer for a few months

Probably. But that doesn't matter if no one advised the client that they needed a realistic, production-like field test (most of the cost for which wouldn't have been part of the contract, since it would have been client side; the developer-side support for that is a small fraction of the cost.) Errors in report definitions that exclude some data in circumstances that don't come up in developer-constructed testing scenarios is, like, not at all uncommon.

That same link has "Software Developers" at $105,590/yr[0]

[0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

> It should have been enough to fund a business analyst and an app developer for a few months. Plus Shadow Inc's overhead + profit.

No. The median software developer makes ~$50/hr. Overhead is 2-3x (usually higher for a smaller company but we'll be generous). So company is charging $100/hr. At 60k that's a single developer working 15 weeks (10 if we're being realistic). But we know that it is at least two developers so that's 7 weeks (2 on our realistic scale).

> A kid can throw together an app in a few days,

Sure, but it doesn't matter if flappy bird crashes occasionally. Flappy bird doesn't need to communicate with other users. I know this app they built wasn't that complicated, but the kids that are pumping out apps in a few days are above average talent and probably working more than 8hrs in a day. You're comparing above average to what is already suspected to be below average (considering they are recent bootcamp graduates and have little experience).