That piece of tech development will cost $750k

JC pontificates about technology An occasional series. →Go uptown Cutting edge reg tech, yesterday From the “Great lies of today™” series Technology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

As we race to the, er, bottom; in that dystopian future where chatbots will wipe our grandparents’ arses and all roles in all banking will be carried out by Marvin the paranoid android—like, the same machine will do the lot; buyer and seller; banker and client, having brute-force-solved human nature right?—we cannot help but pause and remark at the last great anomaly, since it seems to stand between us and these sunlit uplands of blissful technological unemployment that await us: that is, how goddamn expensive any kind of technology implementation is. No matter how crappy.

Not just buying an “application” — “software as a service”, naturellement — that reviews and unimpressively marks up confidentiality agreements for half a million bucks a year, but even a small piece of development work to an existing system, just to make sure it does something that any two-bit home-made iPhone app can do faultlessly — is budgeted to take six months and cost $800k. How is that?

Nice work if you can get it, as a programmer, I guess. But in the meantime, as long as it costs half a mill to add a “download to excel” button, we should resign ourselves to wiping pop’s behind, once we’re back from the office, for a few years yet.

See also

• The singularity
• Reg tech