There are many advantages to working for a small business.

Having a tight-knit group of people to work with, lots of opportunities for growth, and direct access to the owners are just a few.

On the other hand, there is also the risk of having a boss/owner who thinks they know everything about your job, even when they don’t.

That is the situation in this story, where the boss thought it was a good idea to reinvent software that already existed.

Check it out and see what you think.

Let’s reinvent the wheel. Okay boss

I worked as a fullstack developer in a start-up company.

The company had a client that requested a website that will only be up for 3 days and with livestreaming.

Sounds like the CEO has a great idea…so far.

Our CEO quickly saw the opportunity and briefed us that everything here will be reused for all future clients that needs the same feature.

Just for info, I was hired with the job description of creating APIs, dashboards and whatnot.

Typically more on database and API Integration (for non-IT people, basically you automate the usage of other company’s product).

So as someone who has no idea how to implement a livestreaming and someone who has every idea how to implement an API, I quickly looked for companies that offers livestreaming APIs.

I found wowza and vimeo, and suggested them both.

The CEO started out looking good, but is about to have a terrible idea.

This CEO also saw something before that meeting about a company that creates its own products (instead of outsourcing it), and later on sells it.

He fancies this idea so he threw my suggestion and was like “why can’t we do this” and I was like “because we’re a 10-man team with only mobile developers and web developers?” (we don’t even have a tester at this point LMAO).

Long story short, he really love that idea and made us create our own live streaming platform.

Hey, OP warned him.

I made sure that he understand that none of us are qualified to do that (I’m the most senior web developer in that company) and everything we’ll do is something we learned 2 nights ago.

So the reinvention of the wheel is now a go.

I managed to learn a bit about it and successfully made a working prototype.

By my calculation, it would cost P20,000 (Philippine currency) for the amount of expected users, on the expected livestreaming time on a 720 resolution, using a much higher one would cost more.

Note that this is almost same as 1 year subscription to vimeo.

So we launched the “product” (imagine a “car” that was built using 30 different models from 30 different manufacturers joined by glue gun and duct tape), and my boss thought it’s nice to give some perks to our first customer for this product.

The CEO’s ignorance is about to become very apparent.

So he allowed using the livestreaming server for double the time and quadruple the resolution.

And you guessed it, we basically had a server bill 3 times what it would cost for a year of subscription at vimeo.

Plus, that’s only for several hours of usage.

A good boss hires people that are great at their jobs.

A great boss trusts those people to perform their job well.

While coming up with new and improved software can be good, this was a terrible idea.

Fortunately, OP told the boss that it was a bad idea every step of the way so he couldn’t be blamed.

Let’s see what other Redditors thought of this situation.

The concept of ‘failing upward’ is so true in many companies.

Oh, I can tell you he isn’t a genius!

The software development industry is definitely weird like this!

Come on, listen to your subject matter experts.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.