Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Software Eats Software Development as Andreessen Invests $10M in App Outsourcer

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 123 posts

Re: Software Eats Software Development as Andreessen Invests $10M in App Outsourcer

#31

Post by wiremine »

codeshaman wrote: post #8

I'm afraid this is a glimpse into the not so distant future where software developers are next in line after taxi and truck drivers - uncertain if their skills will be required in a decade from now. That is compound by the millions of youngsters who grew up with computers, have unlimited access to unlimited teaching materials and are entering the workforce each year.. The demand for software may be growing (although…

> I'm afraid this is a glimpse into the not so distant future where software developers are next in line after taxi and truck drivers - uncertain if their skills will be required in a decade from now.

That might be true, but I don't see how this article supports that hypothesis. There are still real programmers behind the apps that Gigster:

> The company finds top-notch freelance developers, designers, and project managers with pedigrees from MIT, CalTech, Google, and Stripe, and only accepts 5% of applicants.

Looks like they are mostly automating the estimating and scheduling process.

I think it's a leap to go from automated scheduled to automated programming, especially in the next decade.

Re: Software Eats Software Development as Andreessen Invests $10M in App Outsourcer

#32

Post by onewaystreet »

The real problems with this idea (which isn't new) come after a project has been delivered: It looks nice but you find a bug. What now? What's the turnaround time for getting that bug fixed? What's the cost? What about adding new features? What about scaling? And if you ever want to hire your own developers they have to learn a codebase that you yourself don't even understand.

Re: Software Eats Software Development as Andreessen Invests $10M in App Outsourcer

#33

Post by reedlaw »

codeshaman wrote: post #8

I'm afraid this is a glimpse into the not so distant future where software developers are next in line after taxi and truck drivers - uncertain if their skills will be required in a decade from now. That is compound by the millions of youngsters who grew up with computers, have unlimited access to unlimited teaching materials and are entering the workforce each year.. The demand for software may be growing (although…

> The company finds top-notch freelance developers, designers, and project managers with pedigrees from MIT, CalTech, Google, and Stripe, and only accepts 5% of applicants.

The AI engine makes a price quote and comes up with the production schedule. Those are two things I'd gladly hand off to AI. Quality engineers will still be in demand.

Re: Software Eats Software Development as Andreessen Invests $10M in App Outsourcer

#34

Post by pjmlp »

codeshaman wrote: post #8

I'm afraid this is a glimpse into the not so distant future where software developers are next in line after taxi and truck drivers - uncertain if their skills will be required in a decade from now. That is compound by the millions of youngsters who grew up with computers, have unlimited access to unlimited teaching materials and are entering the workforce each year.. The demand for software may be growing (although…

One needs to move up the ladder to architecture, customer management, ....

That is my feeling with the current offshoring practices.

The way to stay in business in software development in any given country is to move into roles that cannot be easily offshored.

There will always be a country where development costs are cheaper, when the software devs in a country start to level up their earnings, companies will move to the next one.

Re: Software Eats Software Development as Andreessen Invests $10M in App Outsourcer

#35

Post by cognivore »

People who want software built are usually (in my experience, almost always) incapable of describing what they want. But they know what they like or don't like when they see it, and then they get ideas for changes. Unless Gigster (really?) gets that part figured out all they'll be capable of creating is the next app that sits in the middle of the the app store charts that no one cares about.

Re: Software Eats Software Development as Andreessen Invests $10M in App Outsourcer

#37

Post by henrik_w »

Two quotes that I like and think are relevant to the discussion:

"Much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification." -- Fred Brooks

"If you don't understand precisely what you need to do, what makes you think you can tell a computer how to do it?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10173640

For a highly standardized product, maybe the "specifying what you want" isn't a big problem, but in other cases I think it is.

Re: Software Eats Software Development as Andreessen Invests $10M in App Outsourcer

#38

Post by [deleted] »

codeshaman wrote: post #8

I'm afraid this is a glimpse into the not so distant future where software developers are next in line after taxi and truck drivers - uncertain if their skills will be required in a decade from now. That is compound by the millions of youngsters who grew up with computers, have unlimited access to unlimited teaching materials and are entering the workforce each year.. The demand for software may be growing (although…

[deleted]

Re: Software Eats Software Development as Andreessen Invests $10M in App Outsourcer

#39

Post by RobertoG »

jacquesm wrote: post #26
aidos wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More automation more of the time! The world needs to focus on how we collectively become more efficient while working less / relaxing more. Having said that, I think automation of software development has a long way to go before it's particularly effective. Though it's certainly going to be an interesting space to watch. It's somehow weird to imagine a future in which we disrupt ourselves.

All those working on AI are effectively working very hard to put themselves out of business, it's a funny version of poetic justice.

Many of them are very aware of this.

This is the webpage's introduction of one of those people:

"Since age 15 or so, Prof. Jürgen Schmidhuber's goal has been to build a self-improving Artificial Intelligence (AI) smarter than himself, then retire" ( http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/ )

Re: Software Eats Software Development as Andreessen Invests $10M in App Outsourcer

#40

Post by [deleted] »

onewaystreet wrote: post #32

The real problems with this idea (which isn't new) come after a project has been delivered: It looks nice but you find a bug. What now? What's the turnaround time for getting that bug fixed? What's the cost? What about adding new features? What about scaling? And if you ever want to hire your own developers they have to learn a codebase that you yourself don't even understand.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN