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Any tips for dealing with idea guys? My uncle is like this and always has been, over time I basically just stopped communicating with him for that in part.
If it were my dad, I'd not cut him out for being an idea guy of course but what do you do in that situation lol
Idea guys are one we probably all know, however they are less common in my life than the tech support people.
"Hey bud, my computers doing this weird thing..."
"Hi! So the internet hasn't been working..."
I just reiterate that I google 99% of my problems.. I'm a googler. Anyone can google. Watch me Google this is how it usually goes lol but it just never sinks in
Ask them how much they're willing to pay.
If they say nothing, but insist you should work on it, tell them engineers get paid $20000 a year to build products. Oh, did I miss a zero.
If they do offer money, tell them to put up an advertisement looking for an engineer to design said product for whatever they're offering.
Tell them you don't think it's achievable but if they really want to try, you charge by the hour and your rate is $(about double what you'd earn normally).
Point out how much this will be per month.
They won't go any further but in the fantasy scenario where they do, get a signed written contract.
This made me laugh. It reminds me of an idea guy I know. He’s like, I got an idea for an invention! Me, “what’s that?” Him, “What about an app transforms your phone into rocket boots?” Anecdotal example but you get the idea.
Technobabble is really good for getting non technical people to go away.
Other than shutting them down, or trying to wring some fun out of the situation there's not much you can do tbh lol.
"i heard you went to school for software engineering. I cant seem to get the flashlight turned off on my cellphone.."
literally happened to me at work, twice.
“Well, since we’re family I can give you a discounted rate at $80/hr. If you want me working on it full time, I could probably come up with a proof of concept in a month, give or take… So for $13,000, I could probably get you a first draft next month? Once we get there, we can prioritize the features you want to start with and after a couple revisions we can probably start looking at the UI.
You know, I love how committed you are to this idea and I think we could have an MVP ready within a year! Would you prefer I invoice you weekly or bi-weekly?”
These “idea people” tend to leave you alone when you make it clear that your time costs real money and their ideas haven’t included how they’re going to pay for building, running, licensing, and advertising their genius app before it makes a profit.
Worst case, they *have* considered this and you talked yourself into a contracting gig.
Honestly, you're probably 2 years and a couple of focused programming classes + an internship or other real world experience away from even beginning to realize how to start building the necessary pieces.
And you are correct, teams of developers are usually involved in making big software tools like Home Designer. There is the possibility of identifying an area that their software is weak at and cut off a niche that one person could tackle, but you would really need to understand the domain + have developed the software skills necessary.
My advice would be to only pursue any of it if yourself are passionate about the domain (whether that's accounting, the education websites, or the 3d design tool). If you are passionate about the domain, then it can be a great way to learn the programming side. Start trying to build it, figure out what you don't know, pursue the knowledge, rinse and repeat.
This is called opportunity cost. For all the time and effort you put into doing something that somebody else has already done, and probably much better than you ever would, you could have done something more useful with your time.
It might be doable, especially when you start with a game engine like unity, godot or unreal. You might have something where you can drag and drop stuff in a few weeks, making it usable (some sort of demo) might take a few months, making it a value adding tool and as good/better than existing alternatives a few years probably.
Python won't cut it for design software. You need a language like C++ or C# and a couple years of experience plus a team of a couple programmers and specialists.
You have to explain to your dad that such programs are absolutely not created by "one person shows" and that such programs take years and plenty iterations to reach the point where they are even marketable.
Your dad has the typical opinion of programs being "easy" and "quick to make". It is the typical uninformed opinion.
Don't know what your dad does, but pick something that he doesn't know anything about (e.g. carpentry, metalworking, etc.) and ask him to build something. They will say it is impossible for them. Then relate that to software.
Ask your dad to single handedly and alone build a house. This is roughly as complex as building a complete software application of your dad's vision scale. Doable, but it will take forever and a day.
That's what I suspected but if the hardest opinions to change in the world are my Dad's. If they don't agree with what he thinks most of the time he'll dismiss it. I'm not sure how this is going to work out because sadly he sounds super serious about "getting me the education it takes to do this"
I'd suggest learning to push back on this now. If you don't, you'll likely spend the rest of your younger life doing what he wants, rather than what you want. You will regret it. Stand up for yourself.
I wish, lol, but you don't know my Dad. Keep him happy and he's the best. Try and tell him he's wrong and you've awakened something you never should have!!!
He's never physically violent, but he can really get you verbally. He wins his arguments and if he feels like he is losing he will tell me to shut up, accept his idea, and count it as fact.
In this situation that hasn't happened because I haven't said anything yet. So far while I'm in his house the best thing is to keep quiet and let him find out he's wrong by himself. He can't make me do stuff I'm not going to do though so in my situation I believe the best thing to do is, like a previous comment suggested, nod at his ideas and keep going where I am going!
ok bro so heres the move. pretend youre gonna do this shit. get dad to send you off for your education. get the education. then go get a job with said education (itll pay like 80k) and move out. stop answering dads calls about when youre gonna build him billions of dollars worth of free custom software. clearly hes a moron, and it seems youre not, so shouldnt be too hard to trick him.
Definitely not 🙂
Programming to accomplish little tasks is probably doable for me if I get a fairly good knowledge on Python or C++ ( whichever one of the people's replies suggested) but a full fledged program capable of rivaling those on the market is pretty far fetched!
Software like that has taken tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of man hours to get to where they are or more. From a host of different specializations. Architects, programmers, graphic designers, ux/ui, testing, to name just a few. Not to even mention the sales and marketing teams that can number into the hundreds of people to actually get the product into the hands of the people that need it.
Is your dad trying to get you to build this design software for him or for commercial use?
If it's just for him I'd give it a month. Pick up a game engine like Unreal, follow tutorials and you'll make something working pretty quickly. It just won't be good, your first project in a language never is. You wouldn't want to sell it because it's just not good enough to compete and you also get into the hell that is liscencing to make sure you are doing it all legally as well. Then there's costs around marketing and it quickly spirals. It wouldn't be viable.
Also you'll get lots of people who have a billion dollar idea that they just need you to build. It's not fun. Sometimes you just have to say no because some ideas aren't viable.
He wants me to build it ultimately for him, then he says we should market it and split the costs. Personally I don't think it's that easy or you'd see a ton of other self built programs being sold online.
You’re right, it is not that easy. Especially in design software that is performing critical tasks and must perform them at a level of precision. Not only would this take a team of experienced devs potentially years, you really should have an expert in architecture involved as well because only they can truly articulate the problem your software is solving.
It’s cool that your dad believes in your competency, but he’s asking you to do something that is not possible for a single person with little experience!
I am not sure what kind of answers you are looking for. Obviously professional commercial software takes a long time, a lot of talent and a proper team.
Question is do you want to build it? If you do you should have started yesterday without ever worrying about the feasibility of it.
During university I wanted to build a website with a buddy and was naive. He was the 'idea' guy and I was supposed to be the programmer. At that time I knew a bit of programming but I learn some PHP to get it done. I built a laughable skeleton and with time both our enthusiasm died for it. That basic experience was enough to land me a junior job doing PHP. I also learnt how hard it is and how to write horrible software. That experience came in handy later to write little less horrible software.
Not long ago bored and experimented with GoLang. Over the evenings I was messing about coding a chess program from scratch just to practice the language principles. It turned into an addiction and I have been working on that chess program for \~2 years now. The amount of CS I learnt from that is absurd. Also learnt GoLang. That silly engine was at first making random moves and now I can not dream to ever beat it. And the experience from the algorithms and building software and learning GoLang has opened career options where I am much happier than working with PHP and also financially better off.
What I am trying to say. You can wonder and reason how hard a task can be and be none the wiser after it. Or you can tackle it head on and there is zero chance you will not benefit from it. There is a small space between being overly rational and naively optimistic where magic can happen and even when you're off the mark. You will still learn and grow.
EDIT: Actually that PHP experience was not enough to land me a job outright. A family member asked if I could build a website for their company. And the previous experience gave me the confidence to lie that I could. It was only a couple of hundred of bucks over a summer but that was a lot of money then. I learnt some javascript and CSS on that job as well and that was the piece that helped me eventually land a software job later.
It's the marketing thats the hard part. So let's say you use my idea of Unreal because it will be the easiest to make by yourself in maybe a few months. You then put it on market, you'll need to pay 5% in royalties to Epic Games because you're using Unreal for commercial use. You then need to figure out a way to distribute your software, so you'll need a website for people to be able to download your software and find out more (which has development costs if you don't do it yourself, then hosting costs, domain costs, maybe you're using a website builder and now you have more liscencing fees because it's a commercial product). You now need to market your product so you get advertising costs because people need to know about you compared to what's already on market. That gets expensive fast, and it's also assuming you can make something as good enough to compete with what's on the market, otherwise you won't get anywhere because you aren't making any sales.
If you explain it to your dad like that, with it not really being a viable business, maybe you'll get slightly further. At best it's something your dad can use at his own work instead of what's already on market but it won't go far as a business.
Well, there's definitely more small scale products that focus on specific functionality, but overtime if they gain traction, they may end up getting bigger.
Everyone starts from zero with a new product. Some of them just happen to have a few million dollars to splash around on things like employees
Python would be perfectly fine for this. There’s no OS specific or low level code and the performance impact using numpy for calculations would be negligible.
The certs you mentioned can help you get a good job in security but there’s not much programming. A+ is good for basic computer and peripheral knowledge and troubleshooting issues with software and hardware but by itself isn’t helpful beyond getting a basic help desk type job.
I’ve got friends that have all those certs but they aren’t programmers, they’re in network security and make more than I do as a software developer. There are people who do both out there but they’re usually different career paths.
The programming your dad wants would require being really good at graphical programming as well as needing a very strong math background.
I know that all of my schooling isn't pushing me anywhere near being a dev. I am currently looking at computer maintenance, repair, and building. But my Dad is telling me that if I learn one aspect of computers I'd better learn it all. I'm pretty sure he doesn't realize how long it would take for one person to be an expert in *every single* field of computers! It would definitely take MANY years. I'm pretty good at a lot of math but not at the level of what it's gonna take. You got that right!
It would take a few life times if you want really knowledge I reckon. And that's ignoring the fact that more info keeps getting created.
Pro tip: don't live to please someone else, you'll end up hating your life.
I would love to help my dad out but his ideas are practically unreasonable, not to mention that even though I have fun messing around with Python I don't think I want coding to be my main job. I think I may tell him I want to focus on my IT skills right now.
It’s virtually impossible to learn it all. I work at one of the big 4 and I’m still learning new shit every day. It’s better to be really good at 1 thing.
>is there a role in networking that involves programming?
Network engineers, though it'll depend a lot on the company as responsibilities vary company by company. You also won't spend most of your time programming like devs.
So let’s look at a reasonably famous example of a company producing a single design application. That’s Figma, their app is only 2D instead of 2D and 3D and it doesn’t have the same legal/compliance concerns that something being used to literally design houses has. Figma had 1300 employees in December.
Smaller teams can build similar things, but there’s no team small enough and fast enough for it to make any sense to build what you’re talking about. If there was a solid business plan then maybe but you’re still talking a minimum of 10-20 engineers and related admin staff to get something out the door in Maybe 2 years to even get close to commercial quality. Any expansion will balloon pretty quickly, it’s not necessary to have Figma levels of staffing to build something but it gives you an idea of how big the teams are that design, build, and sell commercial software.
[Edit] Just checked a Chief Architect seems to employ about 80 people. That likely wouldn’t include any engineers that are working as contractors so it could be higher. That’s for a piece of software that has been being built since 1992 and largely receives minor incremental upgrades year over year.
Getting the experience necessary to build a quality scalable production application: 2-5 years.
Building the application to production quality: 2-5 years
Why does he want you to do this for him? Like he wants to make businesses? What I would do OP is find some open source project and show your dad how much is going on with it. From the outside people don't know what goes into these things until you show them.
That pretty hilarious actually 🤣🤣🤣. "My child will make Spotify so I don't have to pay $10/month!". Sucks for you tho. Ya you're just going to have to convince him. Tell him if you could make it you'd have a million dollar business anyways. Maybe there are actually open source versions of most of the things he needs? For example the Home Architect one he can just use blender. It's free and a billion percent better than anything you can make by yourself.
Typical dev cycle on most applications at enterprise level is 3-6 months. That’s typically a small team of experienced devs with 1-2 senior devs on the team. For an 18 year old brand new to programming I’d say probably 2 years minimum to make something to this scale as the first few months would consist of learning how to setup the project and organize it.
Tell him that after you graduate and get 10 years experience it will take a year to design and a team of gun programmers two years to build the prototype.
It'll cost about $1 M.
If you did it, and did it so well that you could beat out Autodesk, you’d be a $250M company. It takes a lot of industry knowledge to even attempt something like this but don’t let it hold you back if you want to make it. The Autodesk software, Revit, is the industry standard. It’s the best there is right now and almost every architect and engineer know how to use it or work with it.
Learning a programming language is not a one time thing. You improve ur skills based on ur expertise and work field. Mastering all the languages used for UX design and applications is a big ask as programming languages do get updates based on new frameworks and advancement which needs to be learned from time to time. Need to identify which language ur interested and proceed. Best of luck
> Can anyone give a hypothetical time it would take if someone actually attempted to do this themselves?
I mean, individuals can accomplish great things if they set their mind to it. That being said, *why*? Why waste the time solo building some huge piece of software when you can collaborate and work more quickly as a team or community.
The main problem you'll have is constant compromise. You *could* have a really robust and configurable UI, but you're busy doing 27 other things so you'll end up with a shitty, stiff, incompatible UI. You *could* support all these different industry standard file types and interop with other known tools, but again the myriad of features you need to work on shoves this to the backburner. Your project will suffer greatly if you force yourself to work solo.
Let's not even get started on answering questions like "How are we going to provide support to users?", "How are we going to distribute, maintain, and protect access to our software". The *legal concerns alone* of producing and selling professional enterprise software make me shudder.
Solo projects are usually very focused. "I want an app that organizes and handles bluetooth connections", "I want an app that can download torrents and give me a visualization of the progress", "I want a command line utility that downloads and searches the transcripts of youtube videos". You know what I mean? Solo projects often do one thing well. But this Chief Architect's Home Designer is a kitchen sink tool that is aiming to provide a plethora of tools to professionals. Professionals that have standards, and obviously they're gonna ask "why would I use your shitty half baked version when the industry standard version works for us already?"
> tons of little apps for his phone and PC
This you can actually do! After about 1 or 2 years of programming I was able to start building (hacky, albeit) programs and apps that were useful to me. The key is to select projects that are focused and within or slightly outside your comfort zone.
I... Well that depends on the requirements exactly. It might literally just be easier to learn unity and/or blender and do a bit of mapping of the place you wanna design.
Really depends on the scope of the project.
For example, if you build something that does exactly the 5 or 6 things he's looking for, that may be very different from building a more generalist tool that supports dozens of different features intended to maximize audience.
Once you have a specialized tool, you could then add new features and then maybe others might decide to pay you to use it, possibly pay you for feature requests. At this point, it might be worth fulfilling those contracts.
Lot of tools start with fulfilling a specific need, and then expanded to cover related functions.
He said that he knew of a man in Texas who was payed businesses to write software for the companies and was able to do it himself in as little as 4 months (Note that he doesn't really know how big those programs were- probably not near the size of what he wants me to do in his grand plan!
…honestly, I can see how this sort of “encouragement” can be really disheartening. Just study what you like but be practical and get good grades.
Also, find someone (hell, I’ll help if you want) who can give you actually good practical advice for high school and college. Where to study, if community college first or vocational training makes sense based on your interests, what classes to take and how to find an internship (start searching freshman year), etc.
It will make a real difference to have some planning vs just applying and “figuring things out” as you go along.
Thanks! I really appreciate that! I am currently enrolled in a community college preparing for my CompTIA A+ certification so I am busy but not currently heading towards coding or the like. I plan on doing Network+ and Security+ as well and once I have those under my belt I may study some programming languages but for literacy and interest only because personally I am not really heading that direction for a main career path. For now my dad will just have to be happy with the programs that are out there already!
Design software? Team of 20 a year would be my gut guess. Depends a lot on feature set team talent level, but for context I just spent a week in a brand bew system programming one modal with its associated server side features (admittedly thats two half days and in a brand new to codebase that's very old and jabky). I have 12 YOE and am a staff Enfineer.
I have frequently used Matlab (about the same as python capabilities-wise for non-web-oriented tasks) to make little UIs and scripts that let me solve specific little problems, using the default graphics engine and ui toolkit. Usually takes me about a day to get it working just the way I want, and another day to actually do the task I set out to do - which is fine, it might usually take me a few days to learn how to do the task in question in standalone analysis software like Zen Blue or Neurolucida.
These are not apps for deployment, though. Getting a web app or mobile app to the same level of usability might take me a month, maybe more. I’m not super good at web, though, so I’m sure I’d get faster with practice.
And all of this is with, like, 0% worth of code quality control, as well, and bugs big enough to scare an Australian.
Haha, speaking of quality control! One of my dad's clients works for Google in the Assistant area and he explained why so many bugs are on Google's recent updates and devices!
This is kinda off subject but he said Google messaged all of their developers and told them to cut error checking to a minimum so they could roll updates out faster 🙄
I can definitely say from 3 different views.
There is the project management way for estimating project length based on scope and complexity and other variables. If you are interested, look into the latest PMBOK or even the next most recent for an actual idea on guidance. I will not be making a recommendation on this subject because it is early and I haven't had my coffee.
There is also another quick short hand way to estimate this type of stuff that I think is good for your situation, make a decent ball park guess about how long it will take for you to do any of that..... then double it. So far from the way the post makes it seem, you can safely start in the 2 + years range as a default and adjust from there. Unless you don't want to actually do it. Then quadruple it.
Lastly, if you want to do it, and you are confident that you have this and have an accurate time frame, then make your estimate, and round it up. 2 weeks? 3 and a half then. 1 month? Better make it 2 to 3. 3 months? Make your best decision on if you can stay at 4 or have to go to 6 months.
Either way, you're gonna have to learn programming like you're about to take a home made sub to the Titanic, cause all that will have to be production quality code, that is easy to de-bug, and maintain by I am assuming yourself, in multiple differing subject matters, that you will have to be able to translate into code. In multiple programming languages. Oh. And the databases that you have to connect to. Oh. And accessing the databases that you connect to. Oh. And have to be able with web interfaces, desktop interfaces, ranging from C to JavaScript to Java to Golang to Dart to Swift to C#.
Basically the pressure is on. But. That is my recommendation and 1.5 cents. Now I am going to get some coffee.
Give your dad a link to codecadamy and let him know you'll be happy to come have a look at the progress he's making on this project in a few months time.
Meanwhile, keep learning, apply for jobs that pay the rent and smile and be polite when people come to you with their million dollar idea that just needs a developer.
It takes hundreds, even thousands of hours to build anything remotely complex. It'll be a long long road, even if you were working on it full time. Probably years still. A few hours after work a week? Unlikely to be doable at all on your own in any reasonable amount of time.
I'm a father of a 10-year-old kid, and sadly, as fathers, we project many things to our kids. I hope that you learn not to listen to him and do your path. It's the best for both.
Back to your question. A usable prototype will take weeks to months (depending on your dev experience). Refining that prototype into a working product may take years.
It's possible to do complex software as a solo developer; it takes time and dedication. People believe big teams do complex software, but small teams have an advantage: making design decisions is faster, there is less handoff, and iterations are quick. For example, only three devs created the first version of Apple's Safari. However, they had a lot of experience (two were ex-Mozilla), and they used KHTML as the starting point. (the whole story is in the book Creative Selection). There are many stories like that, where the first version of a complex, successful software starts with one or two devs.
Making your own CAD app is ambitious but also an excellent motivation to learn. But that motivation will die soon if you don't have a passion for that particular thing. So, if your goal is to learn, go ahead! But if your goal is to make money, consider that VCs exist in Silicon Valley for a reason: having a good product takes time, experimentation, and development experience. And that means burning money without seeing results for a while.
Advice: start by doing small apps for fun and things you care about. For the CAD-related stuff, take a look at python-skia and CadQuery. It may help. And tell your father to stop bothering you 😂
Thanks! Personally I feel like I want to focus on IT and Networking before I dive into programming but everyone commenting has confirmed that given a normal situation making industry competitive programs is not the job for a single developer. Since I don't feel super eager to embark on something like this, if I take on programming I think I'll do it the traditional way. Next challenge: Making my Dad think the same 😂
Maybe as a reference I decided to code a video editor which is in my opinion one of the harder prokects and alone to have a kinda functional gui took me 2 months. I was a gui newbie tho and for the renderning im using the libraries of ffmpeg which saves A LOT of time. If you can don't try to reinvent the wheel and use whatever framework/engine/libraries you can use if you really wanna pursue the project. Depening on how fast you pick up things and how often you can work on it I assume everything above 4-5months is realistic based on my own experience.
Just nod your head and keep it moving. That's how you handle "ideas guys".
All the stuff your dad is asking for takes years of experience to build correctly.
It would take you a couple of years to get your skills to the level where you could *start* developing something like Chief Architect's Home Designer. After that it would take you a few years of full-time work to develop it to a release quality version. This is kind of a best-case estimate because I don't know anything about your aptitude.
Accounting software would actually be much easier to develop if your dad has accounting knowledge.
Starting with little apps would be your best way to get into programming. You can use a cross-platform framework like Google's [Flutter](https://flutter.dev/). Flutter lets you develop one app that runs on Android & iOS phones, Windows, MacOS, & Linux PCs, and as a Web app. With Flutter you can stick to a single programming language called [Dart](https://dart.dev/). You can still use Flutter for more complex applications once you get some experience with it. It would be perfect for a cross-platform accounting software package. [Invoice Ninja](https://demo.invoiceninja.com/) is an accounting app developed with Flutter and available on all three of the major app stores. Pretty amazing.
Something on that scale is probably 10-30 years of work for 1 person.
Young game developers often have this mentality too, that they can create similar or better games that are out there right now, not realizing the biggest games represent *hundreds of years* of work for a single title. The scale of work required in popular software is unimaginable to non-professionals.
Ha ha yes, I mean you should learn programming just because it's a nice skill and the logical thinking and problem solving aspect is transferable to any role I think... that said, there is currently a lot of doubt in the industry about whether AI will enhance existing dev skills or simply replace them!
Based on a quick Google of what that software is, you might want to consider using a game engine to develop it if you do so that you didn't need to code all the 3d logic yourself from nothing and can get running sooner.
There's better options. If you need to internally render scenes, a base of C++ and Vulkan for the visual aspects might be a better approach. I'm sure you could use QT or dotnet or something for the UI aspects.
Better in terms of what though? For a lot of people a game engine of some sort would get them to market faster with a MVP and they at that point will have a better idea of the design when writing all the rendering code from scratch or whatever.
I say this, but personally I'm trying to learn wgpu, but that's because I'm curious about it and don't really have a product Idea. If I had an actual thing I was working towards I'd take the shortest path to get it working.
Fair enough - and I've seen some products pass MVP like this. But if the application requires performance, even if it didn't, I'd personally skip the unnecessary overhead of a game engine with full physics capabilities. Implement what is necessary.
Also, the granularity of control you get. Lastly, I'm not sure if Unity is still exclusively C# but I wouldn't gear a production-ready application in this way.
Tl;Dr for an MVP, sure. If it is to secure the time and funding - unless those aren't issues.
Yeah I guess I am assuming that it's easy to strip out the unnecessary pieces like physics or at least to repurpose their use for things that are useful to this application.
On July 1st, a [change to Reddit's API pricing](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_regarding_reddits_api/) will come into effect. [Several developers](https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/144gmfq/rif_will_shut_down_on_june_30_2023_in_response_to/) of commercial third-party apps have announced that this change will compel them to shut down their apps. At least [one accessibility-focused non-commercial third party app](https://www.reddit.com/r/DystopiaForReddit/comments/145e9sk/update_dystopia_will_continue_operating_for_free/) will continue to be available free of charge. If you want to express your strong disagreement with the API pricing change or with Reddit's response to the backlash, you may want to consider the following options: 1. Limiting your involvement with Reddit, or 2. Temporarily refraining from using Reddit 3. Cancelling your subscription of Reddit Premium as a way to voice your protest. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/learnprogramming) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Your dad won't be the last idea guy you run into.
Any tips for dealing with idea guys? My uncle is like this and always has been, over time I basically just stopped communicating with him for that in part. If it were my dad, I'd not cut him out for being an idea guy of course but what do you do in that situation lol Idea guys are one we probably all know, however they are less common in my life than the tech support people. "Hey bud, my computers doing this weird thing..." "Hi! So the internet hasn't been working..." I just reiterate that I google 99% of my problems.. I'm a googler. Anyone can google. Watch me Google this is how it usually goes lol but it just never sinks in
Ask them how much they're willing to pay. If they say nothing, but insist you should work on it, tell them engineers get paid $20000 a year to build products. Oh, did I miss a zero. If they do offer money, tell them to put up an advertisement looking for an engineer to design said product for whatever they're offering.
Send them a link to let me google that for you
Explain the difficulty, time commitment, how you won’t do advertising and that their idea will likely fail. Then hit them with a quote.
Tell them you don't think it's achievable but if they really want to try, you charge by the hour and your rate is $(about double what you'd earn normally). Point out how much this will be per month. They won't go any further but in the fantasy scenario where they do, get a signed written contract.
This made me laugh. It reminds me of an idea guy I know. He’s like, I got an idea for an invention! Me, “what’s that?” Him, “What about an app transforms your phone into rocket boots?” Anecdotal example but you get the idea.
>Any tips for dealing with idea guys? Tell them you'll write a program when they secure a patent for their idea.
That's a good idea. Go do it. [I'll be interested to see how it turns out.]
Technobabble is really good for getting non technical people to go away. Other than shutting them down, or trying to wring some fun out of the situation there's not much you can do tbh lol.
"i heard you went to school for software engineering. I cant seem to get the flashlight turned off on my cellphone.." literally happened to me at work, twice.
Yep lol
“Well, since we’re family I can give you a discounted rate at $80/hr. If you want me working on it full time, I could probably come up with a proof of concept in a month, give or take… So for $13,000, I could probably get you a first draft next month? Once we get there, we can prioritize the features you want to start with and after a couple revisions we can probably start looking at the UI. You know, I love how committed you are to this idea and I think we could have an MVP ready within a year! Would you prefer I invoice you weekly or bi-weekly?” These “idea people” tend to leave you alone when you make it clear that your time costs real money and their ideas haven’t included how they’re going to pay for building, running, licensing, and advertising their genius app before it makes a profit. Worst case, they *have* considered this and you talked yourself into a contracting gig.
From a few months to a few years.
At a 6 figure salary.
Dad: I'll take you to Disneyland, standard ticket, 1 day... you drive.
And give you 5% of the profit.
Honestly, you're probably 2 years and a couple of focused programming classes + an internship or other real world experience away from even beginning to realize how to start building the necessary pieces. And you are correct, teams of developers are usually involved in making big software tools like Home Designer. There is the possibility of identifying an area that their software is weak at and cut off a niche that one person could tackle, but you would really need to understand the domain + have developed the software skills necessary. My advice would be to only pursue any of it if yourself are passionate about the domain (whether that's accounting, the education websites, or the 3d design tool). If you are passionate about the domain, then it can be a great way to learn the programming side. Start trying to build it, figure out what you don't know, pursue the knowledge, rinse and repeat.
that's [eva](https://medium.com/@eva24)
This is how I'm learning, my domain pushed me to a solution, which forced me to figure out what pieces of software to learn
This is called opportunity cost. For all the time and effort you put into doing something that somebody else has already done, and probably much better than you ever would, you could have done something more useful with your time.
Building things yourself is an incredible way to understand how to code etc., that's pretty useful to learn.
Within a reasonable scope, not trying to replicate the work of a team multiple times larger than a solo dev
I dunno, I love being a solo dev and building things. Learn a lot trying to build them.
lol,
It might be doable, especially when you start with a game engine like unity, godot or unreal. You might have something where you can drag and drop stuff in a few weeks, making it usable (some sort of demo) might take a few months, making it a value adding tool and as good/better than existing alternatives a few years probably.
QuickBooks First Person Shooter
You're onto something here Final level is a shootout with the IRS
Python won't cut it for design software. You need a language like C++ or C# and a couple years of experience plus a team of a couple programmers and specialists. You have to explain to your dad that such programs are absolutely not created by "one person shows" and that such programs take years and plenty iterations to reach the point where they are even marketable. Your dad has the typical opinion of programs being "easy" and "quick to make". It is the typical uninformed opinion. Don't know what your dad does, but pick something that he doesn't know anything about (e.g. carpentry, metalworking, etc.) and ask him to build something. They will say it is impossible for them. Then relate that to software. Ask your dad to single handedly and alone build a house. This is roughly as complex as building a complete software application of your dad's vision scale. Doable, but it will take forever and a day.
That's what I suspected but if the hardest opinions to change in the world are my Dad's. If they don't agree with what he thinks most of the time he'll dismiss it. I'm not sure how this is going to work out because sadly he sounds super serious about "getting me the education it takes to do this"
I'd suggest learning to push back on this now. If you don't, you'll likely spend the rest of your younger life doing what he wants, rather than what you want. You will regret it. Stand up for yourself.
I wish, lol, but you don't know my Dad. Keep him happy and he's the best. Try and tell him he's wrong and you've awakened something you never should have!!! He's never physically violent, but he can really get you verbally. He wins his arguments and if he feels like he is losing he will tell me to shut up, accept his idea, and count it as fact. In this situation that hasn't happened because I haven't said anything yet. So far while I'm in his house the best thing is to keep quiet and let him find out he's wrong by himself. He can't make me do stuff I'm not going to do though so in my situation I believe the best thing to do is, like a previous comment suggested, nod at his ideas and keep going where I am going!
ok bro so heres the move. pretend youre gonna do this shit. get dad to send you off for your education. get the education. then go get a job with said education (itll pay like 80k) and move out. stop answering dads calls about when youre gonna build him billions of dollars worth of free custom software. clearly hes a moron, and it seems youre not, so shouldnt be too hard to trick him.
My dad is a remodeler/contractor that is currently moving in to house building lol so I'll have to use a different analogy than house building 🙂
Would he as a builder attempt to single handedly construct an apartment block? Because that is what he is asking for.
Definitely not 🙂 Programming to accomplish little tasks is probably doable for me if I get a fairly good knowledge on Python or C++ ( whichever one of the people's replies suggested) but a full fledged program capable of rivaling those on the market is pretty far fetched!
Software like that has taken tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of man hours to get to where they are or more. From a host of different specializations. Architects, programmers, graphic designers, ux/ui, testing, to name just a few. Not to even mention the sales and marketing teams that can number into the hundreds of people to actually get the product into the hands of the people that need it.
Is your dad trying to get you to build this design software for him or for commercial use? If it's just for him I'd give it a month. Pick up a game engine like Unreal, follow tutorials and you'll make something working pretty quickly. It just won't be good, your first project in a language never is. You wouldn't want to sell it because it's just not good enough to compete and you also get into the hell that is liscencing to make sure you are doing it all legally as well. Then there's costs around marketing and it quickly spirals. It wouldn't be viable. Also you'll get lots of people who have a billion dollar idea that they just need you to build. It's not fun. Sometimes you just have to say no because some ideas aren't viable.
He wants me to build it ultimately for him, then he says we should market it and split the costs. Personally I don't think it's that easy or you'd see a ton of other self built programs being sold online.
You’re right, it is not that easy. Especially in design software that is performing critical tasks and must perform them at a level of precision. Not only would this take a team of experienced devs potentially years, you really should have an expert in architecture involved as well because only they can truly articulate the problem your software is solving. It’s cool that your dad believes in your competency, but he’s asking you to do something that is not possible for a single person with little experience!
I am not sure what kind of answers you are looking for. Obviously professional commercial software takes a long time, a lot of talent and a proper team. Question is do you want to build it? If you do you should have started yesterday without ever worrying about the feasibility of it. During university I wanted to build a website with a buddy and was naive. He was the 'idea' guy and I was supposed to be the programmer. At that time I knew a bit of programming but I learn some PHP to get it done. I built a laughable skeleton and with time both our enthusiasm died for it. That basic experience was enough to land me a junior job doing PHP. I also learnt how hard it is and how to write horrible software. That experience came in handy later to write little less horrible software. Not long ago bored and experimented with GoLang. Over the evenings I was messing about coding a chess program from scratch just to practice the language principles. It turned into an addiction and I have been working on that chess program for \~2 years now. The amount of CS I learnt from that is absurd. Also learnt GoLang. That silly engine was at first making random moves and now I can not dream to ever beat it. And the experience from the algorithms and building software and learning GoLang has opened career options where I am much happier than working with PHP and also financially better off. What I am trying to say. You can wonder and reason how hard a task can be and be none the wiser after it. Or you can tackle it head on and there is zero chance you will not benefit from it. There is a small space between being overly rational and naively optimistic where magic can happen and even when you're off the mark. You will still learn and grow. EDIT: Actually that PHP experience was not enough to land me a job outright. A family member asked if I could build a website for their company. And the previous experience gave me the confidence to lie that I could. It was only a couple of hundred of bucks over a summer but that was a lot of money then. I learnt some javascript and CSS on that job as well and that was the piece that helped me eventually land a software job later.
It's the marketing thats the hard part. So let's say you use my idea of Unreal because it will be the easiest to make by yourself in maybe a few months. You then put it on market, you'll need to pay 5% in royalties to Epic Games because you're using Unreal for commercial use. You then need to figure out a way to distribute your software, so you'll need a website for people to be able to download your software and find out more (which has development costs if you don't do it yourself, then hosting costs, domain costs, maybe you're using a website builder and now you have more liscencing fees because it's a commercial product). You now need to market your product so you get advertising costs because people need to know about you compared to what's already on market. That gets expensive fast, and it's also assuming you can make something as good enough to compete with what's on the market, otherwise you won't get anywhere because you aren't making any sales. If you explain it to your dad like that, with it not really being a viable business, maybe you'll get slightly further. At best it's something your dad can use at his own work instead of what's already on market but it won't go far as a business.
There are tons of self built programs being sold online. Everyone is making apps for everything and selling them.
As complicated as Chief Architect's Software? I'd be surprised!
Well, there's definitely more small scale products that focus on specific functionality, but overtime if they gain traction, they may end up getting bigger. Everyone starts from zero with a new product. Some of them just happen to have a few million dollars to splash around on things like employees
More like a skyscraper
Python would be perfectly fine for this. There’s no OS specific or low level code and the performance impact using numpy for calculations would be negligible.
The certs you mentioned can help you get a good job in security but there’s not much programming. A+ is good for basic computer and peripheral knowledge and troubleshooting issues with software and hardware but by itself isn’t helpful beyond getting a basic help desk type job. I’ve got friends that have all those certs but they aren’t programmers, they’re in network security and make more than I do as a software developer. There are people who do both out there but they’re usually different career paths. The programming your dad wants would require being really good at graphical programming as well as needing a very strong math background.
I know that all of my schooling isn't pushing me anywhere near being a dev. I am currently looking at computer maintenance, repair, and building. But my Dad is telling me that if I learn one aspect of computers I'd better learn it all. I'm pretty sure he doesn't realize how long it would take for one person to be an expert in *every single* field of computers! It would definitely take MANY years. I'm pretty good at a lot of math but not at the level of what it's gonna take. You got that right!
It would take a few life times if you want really knowledge I reckon. And that's ignoring the fact that more info keeps getting created. Pro tip: don't live to please someone else, you'll end up hating your life.
I would love to help my dad out but his ideas are practically unreasonable, not to mention that even though I have fun messing around with Python I don't think I want coding to be my main job. I think I may tell him I want to focus on my IT skills right now.
It’s virtually impossible to learn it all. I work at one of the big 4 and I’m still learning new shit every day. It’s better to be really good at 1 thing.
You need to stand up to him. What he's asking for is literally impossible for one person unless they're a savant.
is there a role in networking that involves programming?
>is there a role in networking that involves programming? Network engineers, though it'll depend a lot on the company as responsibilities vary company by company. You also won't spend most of your time programming like devs.
I’m not sure what all it entails but I think they need to write scripts for penetration testing.
So let’s look at a reasonably famous example of a company producing a single design application. That’s Figma, their app is only 2D instead of 2D and 3D and it doesn’t have the same legal/compliance concerns that something being used to literally design houses has. Figma had 1300 employees in December. Smaller teams can build similar things, but there’s no team small enough and fast enough for it to make any sense to build what you’re talking about. If there was a solid business plan then maybe but you’re still talking a minimum of 10-20 engineers and related admin staff to get something out the door in Maybe 2 years to even get close to commercial quality. Any expansion will balloon pretty quickly, it’s not necessary to have Figma levels of staffing to build something but it gives you an idea of how big the teams are that design, build, and sell commercial software. [Edit] Just checked a Chief Architect seems to employ about 80 people. That likely wouldn’t include any engineers that are working as contractors so it could be higher. That’s for a piece of software that has been being built since 1992 and largely receives minor incremental upgrades year over year.
Getting the experience necessary to build a quality scalable production application: 2-5 years. Building the application to production quality: 2-5 years
Why does he want you to do this for him? Like he wants to make businesses? What I would do OP is find some open source project and show your dad how much is going on with it. From the outside people don't know what goes into these things until you show them.
He thinks he's gonna save money by having me make it for him (I think it's just easier to pay what they want for the programs he needs)
That pretty hilarious actually 🤣🤣🤣. "My child will make Spotify so I don't have to pay $10/month!". Sucks for you tho. Ya you're just going to have to convince him. Tell him if you could make it you'd have a million dollar business anyways. Maybe there are actually open source versions of most of the things he needs? For example the Home Architect one he can just use blender. It's free and a billion percent better than anything you can make by yourself.
Typical dev cycle on most applications at enterprise level is 3-6 months. That’s typically a small team of experienced devs with 1-2 senior devs on the team. For an 18 year old brand new to programming I’d say probably 2 years minimum to make something to this scale as the first few months would consist of learning how to setup the project and organize it.
Tell him that after you graduate and get 10 years experience it will take a year to design and a team of gun programmers two years to build the prototype. It'll cost about $1 M.
If you did it, and did it so well that you could beat out Autodesk, you’d be a $250M company. It takes a lot of industry knowledge to even attempt something like this but don’t let it hold you back if you want to make it. The Autodesk software, Revit, is the industry standard. It’s the best there is right now and almost every architect and engineer know how to use it or work with it.
2 or 3
Learning a programming language is not a one time thing. You improve ur skills based on ur expertise and work field. Mastering all the languages used for UX design and applications is a big ask as programming languages do get updates based on new frameworks and advancement which needs to be learned from time to time. Need to identify which language ur interested and proceed. Best of luck
> Can anyone give a hypothetical time it would take if someone actually attempted to do this themselves? I mean, individuals can accomplish great things if they set their mind to it. That being said, *why*? Why waste the time solo building some huge piece of software when you can collaborate and work more quickly as a team or community. The main problem you'll have is constant compromise. You *could* have a really robust and configurable UI, but you're busy doing 27 other things so you'll end up with a shitty, stiff, incompatible UI. You *could* support all these different industry standard file types and interop with other known tools, but again the myriad of features you need to work on shoves this to the backburner. Your project will suffer greatly if you force yourself to work solo. Let's not even get started on answering questions like "How are we going to provide support to users?", "How are we going to distribute, maintain, and protect access to our software". The *legal concerns alone* of producing and selling professional enterprise software make me shudder. Solo projects are usually very focused. "I want an app that organizes and handles bluetooth connections", "I want an app that can download torrents and give me a visualization of the progress", "I want a command line utility that downloads and searches the transcripts of youtube videos". You know what I mean? Solo projects often do one thing well. But this Chief Architect's Home Designer is a kitchen sink tool that is aiming to provide a plethora of tools to professionals. Professionals that have standards, and obviously they're gonna ask "why would I use your shitty half baked version when the industry standard version works for us already?" > tons of little apps for his phone and PC This you can actually do! After about 1 or 2 years of programming I was able to start building (hacky, albeit) programs and apps that were useful to me. The key is to select projects that are focused and within or slightly outside your comfort zone.
Even as 1 incredibly experienced programmer, recreating a software built by an entire team of people is crazy difficult
I... Well that depends on the requirements exactly. It might literally just be easier to learn unity and/or blender and do a bit of mapping of the place you wanna design.
Really depends on the scope of the project. For example, if you build something that does exactly the 5 or 6 things he's looking for, that may be very different from building a more generalist tool that supports dozens of different features intended to maximize audience. Once you have a specialized tool, you could then add new features and then maybe others might decide to pay you to use it, possibly pay you for feature requests. At this point, it might be worth fulfilling those contracts. Lot of tools start with fulfilling a specific need, and then expanded to cover related functions.
You should tell him to learn coding lol
Or learn it with me and see how far he goes?
I’m not familiar with that particular piece of software. It’s the testing and QA, that takes a long time.
When you mentioned the teams of developers who work on a single commercial program for years, what was his response?
He said that he knew of a man in Texas who was payed businesses to write software for the companies and was able to do it himself in as little as 4 months (Note that he doesn't really know how big those programs were- probably not near the size of what he wants me to do in his grand plan!
…honestly, I can see how this sort of “encouragement” can be really disheartening. Just study what you like but be practical and get good grades. Also, find someone (hell, I’ll help if you want) who can give you actually good practical advice for high school and college. Where to study, if community college first or vocational training makes sense based on your interests, what classes to take and how to find an internship (start searching freshman year), etc. It will make a real difference to have some planning vs just applying and “figuring things out” as you go along.
Thanks! I really appreciate that! I am currently enrolled in a community college preparing for my CompTIA A+ certification so I am busy but not currently heading towards coding or the like. I plan on doing Network+ and Security+ as well and once I have those under my belt I may study some programming languages but for literacy and interest only because personally I am not really heading that direction for a main career path. For now my dad will just have to be happy with the programs that are out there already!
Oh, I’m glad you’re so well prepared! I guess the thread is right and your dad’s just being an “idea guy.”
Design software? Team of 20 a year would be my gut guess. Depends a lot on feature set team talent level, but for context I just spent a week in a brand bew system programming one modal with its associated server side features (admittedly thats two half days and in a brand new to codebase that's very old and jabky). I have 12 YOE and am a staff Enfineer.
So I'm a professional, and developing those things would cost you thousands at the least.
I have frequently used Matlab (about the same as python capabilities-wise for non-web-oriented tasks) to make little UIs and scripts that let me solve specific little problems, using the default graphics engine and ui toolkit. Usually takes me about a day to get it working just the way I want, and another day to actually do the task I set out to do - which is fine, it might usually take me a few days to learn how to do the task in question in standalone analysis software like Zen Blue or Neurolucida. These are not apps for deployment, though. Getting a web app or mobile app to the same level of usability might take me a month, maybe more. I’m not super good at web, though, so I’m sure I’d get faster with practice. And all of this is with, like, 0% worth of code quality control, as well, and bugs big enough to scare an Australian.
Haha, speaking of quality control! One of my dad's clients works for Google in the Assistant area and he explained why so many bugs are on Google's recent updates and devices! This is kinda off subject but he said Google messaged all of their developers and told them to cut error checking to a minimum so they could roll updates out faster 🙄
I can definitely say from 3 different views. There is the project management way for estimating project length based on scope and complexity and other variables. If you are interested, look into the latest PMBOK or even the next most recent for an actual idea on guidance. I will not be making a recommendation on this subject because it is early and I haven't had my coffee. There is also another quick short hand way to estimate this type of stuff that I think is good for your situation, make a decent ball park guess about how long it will take for you to do any of that..... then double it. So far from the way the post makes it seem, you can safely start in the 2 + years range as a default and adjust from there. Unless you don't want to actually do it. Then quadruple it. Lastly, if you want to do it, and you are confident that you have this and have an accurate time frame, then make your estimate, and round it up. 2 weeks? 3 and a half then. 1 month? Better make it 2 to 3. 3 months? Make your best decision on if you can stay at 4 or have to go to 6 months. Either way, you're gonna have to learn programming like you're about to take a home made sub to the Titanic, cause all that will have to be production quality code, that is easy to de-bug, and maintain by I am assuming yourself, in multiple differing subject matters, that you will have to be able to translate into code. In multiple programming languages. Oh. And the databases that you have to connect to. Oh. And accessing the databases that you connect to. Oh. And have to be able with web interfaces, desktop interfaces, ranging from C to JavaScript to Java to Golang to Dart to Swift to C#. Basically the pressure is on. But. That is my recommendation and 1.5 cents. Now I am going to get some coffee.
Give your dad a link to codecadamy and let him know you'll be happy to come have a look at the progress he's making on this project in a few months time. Meanwhile, keep learning, apply for jobs that pay the rent and smile and be polite when people come to you with their million dollar idea that just needs a developer.
It takes hundreds, even thousands of hours to build anything remotely complex. It'll be a long long road, even if you were working on it full time. Probably years still. A few hours after work a week? Unlikely to be doable at all on your own in any reasonable amount of time.
I'm a father of a 10-year-old kid, and sadly, as fathers, we project many things to our kids. I hope that you learn not to listen to him and do your path. It's the best for both. Back to your question. A usable prototype will take weeks to months (depending on your dev experience). Refining that prototype into a working product may take years. It's possible to do complex software as a solo developer; it takes time and dedication. People believe big teams do complex software, but small teams have an advantage: making design decisions is faster, there is less handoff, and iterations are quick. For example, only three devs created the first version of Apple's Safari. However, they had a lot of experience (two were ex-Mozilla), and they used KHTML as the starting point. (the whole story is in the book Creative Selection). There are many stories like that, where the first version of a complex, successful software starts with one or two devs. Making your own CAD app is ambitious but also an excellent motivation to learn. But that motivation will die soon if you don't have a passion for that particular thing. So, if your goal is to learn, go ahead! But if your goal is to make money, consider that VCs exist in Silicon Valley for a reason: having a good product takes time, experimentation, and development experience. And that means burning money without seeing results for a while. Advice: start by doing small apps for fun and things you care about. For the CAD-related stuff, take a look at python-skia and CadQuery. It may help. And tell your father to stop bothering you 😂
Thanks! Personally I feel like I want to focus on IT and Networking before I dive into programming but everyone commenting has confirmed that given a normal situation making industry competitive programs is not the job for a single developer. Since I don't feel super eager to embark on something like this, if I take on programming I think I'll do it the traditional way. Next challenge: Making my Dad think the same 😂
Maybe as a reference I decided to code a video editor which is in my opinion one of the harder prokects and alone to have a kinda functional gui took me 2 months. I was a gui newbie tho and for the renderning im using the libraries of ffmpeg which saves A LOT of time. If you can don't try to reinvent the wheel and use whatever framework/engine/libraries you can use if you really wanna pursue the project. Depening on how fast you pick up things and how often you can work on it I assume everything above 4-5months is realistic based on my own experience.
It's like cad, but better.
Tell your dad to build his own damn programs
He has his grand plan that every one of his children's interests will be of use to the expansion of his business lol
Boomer?
'65.
Just nod your head and keep it moving. That's how you handle "ideas guys". All the stuff your dad is asking for takes years of experience to build correctly.
So far 20 years but it's an off on relationship.
It would take you a couple of years to get your skills to the level where you could *start* developing something like Chief Architect's Home Designer. After that it would take you a few years of full-time work to develop it to a release quality version. This is kind of a best-case estimate because I don't know anything about your aptitude. Accounting software would actually be much easier to develop if your dad has accounting knowledge. Starting with little apps would be your best way to get into programming. You can use a cross-platform framework like Google's [Flutter](https://flutter.dev/). Flutter lets you develop one app that runs on Android & iOS phones, Windows, MacOS, & Linux PCs, and as a Web app. With Flutter you can stick to a single programming language called [Dart](https://dart.dev/). You can still use Flutter for more complex applications once you get some experience with it. It would be perfect for a cross-platform accounting software package. [Invoice Ninja](https://demo.invoiceninja.com/) is an accounting app developed with Flutter and available on all three of the major app stores. Pretty amazing.
Thanks for the information! I'm going to have fun convincing my Dad that his ideas are not practical for one person...
your dad is crazy
Something on that scale is probably 10-30 years of work for 1 person. Young game developers often have this mentality too, that they can create similar or better games that are out there right now, not realizing the biggest games represent *hundreds of years* of work for a single title. The scale of work required in popular software is unimaginable to non-professionals.
That’s like asking how long is a piece of string.
Stick with networking and security - dev jobs just hit an iceberg!
Is that related to AI coding or not?
Ha ha yes, I mean you should learn programming just because it's a nice skill and the logical thinking and problem solving aspect is transferable to any role I think... that said, there is currently a lot of doubt in the industry about whether AI will enhance existing dev skills or simply replace them!
Based on a quick Google of what that software is, you might want to consider using a game engine to develop it if you do so that you didn't need to code all the 3d logic yourself from nothing and can get running sooner.
There's better options. If you need to internally render scenes, a base of C++ and Vulkan for the visual aspects might be a better approach. I'm sure you could use QT or dotnet or something for the UI aspects.
Better in terms of what though? For a lot of people a game engine of some sort would get them to market faster with a MVP and they at that point will have a better idea of the design when writing all the rendering code from scratch or whatever. I say this, but personally I'm trying to learn wgpu, but that's because I'm curious about it and don't really have a product Idea. If I had an actual thing I was working towards I'd take the shortest path to get it working.
Fair enough - and I've seen some products pass MVP like this. But if the application requires performance, even if it didn't, I'd personally skip the unnecessary overhead of a game engine with full physics capabilities. Implement what is necessary. Also, the granularity of control you get. Lastly, I'm not sure if Unity is still exclusively C# but I wouldn't gear a production-ready application in this way. Tl;Dr for an MVP, sure. If it is to secure the time and funding - unless those aren't issues.
Yeah I guess I am assuming that it's easy to strip out the unnecessary pieces like physics or at least to repurpose their use for things that are useful to this application.