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Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think
31–40 of 445 posts
Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think
#32This thread seems to suggest that there are heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the world and accessible to any software engineer. That they are not being picked up suggests that there's some other constraint. Either extracting this value is not really worth one's time, or the bottleneck is not the ability to automate things but some other rare skill.
It's sales and marketing.
Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think
#33I’ve had four jobs in my life and have always been stunned by what is still done by hand. Every company had a task which could be heavily automated but was instead consuming 4-30 people. So if you think the software market is large, consider all the stuff software never reached.
We are always looking for ideas!
Can you give a few examples, please?
Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think
#34I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…
Want your mind to be blown even more? I worked for a multinational company, I would not be surpised that this company is among the top 10 SAP customers worldwide. Well, everybody hated hated hated SAP, it was a huge hindrance instead of any help.Any use beyond of a "dumb" database was a huge PITA, and I am not fully convinced that all in all it helped more than damaged the business. It was clunky, unintutive, slow, ugly, archaic and a long etc. There were these guys, that were trained as "experts" but they frankly behave more like witch doctors. SAP is coasting just by its name and legacy but from my POV is ripe for the taking. It is not easy though, ERP systems are hard, and changing them ever harder, but in my fantasy world I would like to develop some program and would be very happy to skim
0.00001% of their income.
Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think
#35I work for a Fortune 150 manufacturing company. When I started working here there was no IT group at all (it was all outsourced). The CEO and President said many times that we were not a software/technology company and that would never be a core focus. Nearly 2 decades later, technology is now listed as number 2 of our top 5 core focus. We are working on converting all contractors into full time employees. The IT gro…
What do you manufacture?
Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is fascinating to me, because virtually all my friends have heard of SAP outside of IT - as users or recipients. My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc. At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very star…
> At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in com…
There are also alternate vendors of ERP. Microsoft Dynamics NAV for example. At my current shop I manage INFOR VISUAL ERP.
Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think
#37I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…
When I was starting school, my dad had informed me that SAP was HUGE, and consultants with SAP skills were pulling in 200k, back when even google employees were still waiting to IPO.
Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think
#38This thread seems to suggest that there are heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the world and accessible to any software engineer. That they are not being picked up suggests that there's some other constraint. Either extracting this value is not really worth one's time, or the bottleneck is not the ability to automate things but some other rare skill.
It's sales and marketing.
There seems to be more people doing sales/marketing than software engineers (though I don't have any numbers).
Why aren't they picking up the bills?
Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think
#39I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…
Why would you use ERP instead of a regular SQL database?
edit Got a lot of vote downs. This was a genuine question from someone completely ignorant on what ERP is. Not trying to say that SQL is better, but I'm asking this because I'm ignorant of what ERP is and the description makes it appear as if it's a database.
What's the difference? would be better wording I guess.
Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can't land a job as a junior programmer, you don't want to go around to businesses and end up responsible for promises you can't keep.
What a lot of these businesses need is very simple stuff. Plenty of small businesses would have use for what would consider “toy” programs. A friend of mine built a text message to email system for this rural delivery guy for the purpose of letting his office assistant manage invoices, but also allowing him to fulfill orders on the go without talking on the phone as his customers can just text him. Charges him $500 a…
I don't think that is often trivial and it wouldn't surprise me to see junior programmers struggle with things like that, but maybe the average junior programmer is better than I expect.