[wp-hackers] Amount of estimated developer-hours in WordPress

[Anca Mosoiu]

This was a pretty neat calculation, and I enjoyed checking out the referenced articles (especially the 10 lines of code one).

But...

$2.4 million seems pretty low for a commercially-developed CMS, especially one as full-featured as WordPress is.

The cost calculation doesn't include any scoping or design time, which also needs to be factored into product costs.   It doesn't include the cost for project management or all those other things that go into the 10 lines of code a day metric.  Or any overhead cost.

Also your developer costs seem low if you are looking to hire "elite" programmers - who make a lot more than $42K/year Canadian, as far as I can tell from sampling my own and my friends' programmer salaries.

Nor does it include marketing costs, which would be incurred if you wanted to design a product that's as widely-used as WordPress is.

If you are a big company trying to develop a CMS because you don't trust ones that were not created in-house, your costs will go up even more as your team is pulled hither and yon by management, support efforts for ongoing systems, structural reorganizations, and hatred from the users, who will have to change whatever inefficient system they were using before for one that's buggy and won't work right for at least 2-3 years.

Cheers,

Anca.

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Anca Mosoiu
anca at anca.tv