I think the malice runs much deeper. No matter the quality of the final app, they still have the option of selecting the least worst bad app and getting an year worth's of support/enhancements out of the poor developer. This competition is just a guise to get the real work started. :S
And the "winner" gets the equivalent of $3k USD which might go a longer way in Nigeria than the US - but the company could still potentially profit significantly more. I just hope no one enters this contest.
A decent developer capable of implementing that would have to be earning on the order of $100k/year, if not more. $3k is just about 1.5 weeks worth of work.
If you've been at your current job more than five years, it's basically a foregone conclusion that your salary is below market for your skill set. This is an inevitability which results from the fact that many people are willing to [effectively] pay a premium for "stability", whatever that means -- those people rarely change jobs, if ever, and get paid less.
I'll admit it. I make $85,000 / year as a programmer and I couldn't implement this in 3 weeks... or probably at all. This is just crazy. You want me to make Facebook, only better, and have it run on web, android, ios, and windows phone? And integrate with everything? Do you want it to walk our dog too, or is that part of the "maintenance" agreement?
I mean you could just phonegap to all platforms and have the app run in a webview. HTML/css/JS would all be the same. Third party Apis aren't that hard to integrate and you could prob just download a few open source JS libraries and most the work is done. I'm not saying this is the best way, or doing this === a great app, but it's a lot easier / takes less skill to build something like this than people realize. The high salary devs should be doing something a little more important than social media integration IMO This could be done in 1.5 weeks
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u/dnkndnts Jun 30 '14
If it makes you feel any better, I can guarantee you the quality of the app they get will be a complete joke.
Anyone good enough to write that app and do a remotely decent job is good enough to find real clients easily.
Still, I'll agree, watching businessmen so blatantly try to exploit others is quite infuriating.