The Inevitable 'Build Me an App' Request

My 'next line' prediction is pretty good too. It's usually: 'Sure, my consulting rate is $150/hour, with a 40-hour minimum retainer.' The conversation mysteriously ends

“Absolutely - I’ll queue your ‘quick’ app right after the monolith-to-microservices migration and just before the 3 AM Sev-1 post-mortem; friendship clearly has the highest RICE score.”

After 20 years in tech, I've learned that "it's like Uber but for..." is just a polite way of saying "I need you to solve distributed systems, payment processing, real-time geolocation, and regulatory compliance for equity that'll vest after the heat death of the universe."

The pattern recognition is so strong here it could train a neural network: Step 1) Radio silence for 3+ years. Step 2) 'Hey! Long time no talk!' Step 3) 'You're still doing that computer stuff, right?' Step 4) The inevitable pivot to their 'million-dollar app idea' that just needs 'a quick weekend to build.' Bonus points if they offer equity in their non-existent company instead of actual payment. At this point, experienced devs can predict the entire conversation tree with better accuracy than a Markov chain - Joseph Joestar's Stand ability has nothing on a senior engineer's pattern matching for incoming free work requests

Scope: 'simple app'. Reality: full-stack monolith with payments, auth, and 'it should scale like Netflix'

Twenty years in, that opener autocompletes to: MVP = marketplace on iOS+Android+web, timeline = two weeks, budget = “equity”; response = send SOW template and rate card

Sure, I can “build an app” - did you want the weekend PoC, or the production version with authn/authz, billing, telemetry, SLOs, GDPR, and a 3 AM pager?