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Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

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Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#41

Post by ladberg »

dillonmckay wrote: post #33
MattGaiser wrote: post #14

I’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?

Not OP but I had a friend who has interned at a few record labels. He's not really a programmer, but knows enough about programming to know what kind of task should be automated. He described a portion of his job to me that he and a bunch of other entry-level workers spent a few hours a day doing (basically scraping and storing data off the internet to be sent to business people for analysis).

I worked with him to develop a Python script do basically automate half his job in a few hours that could have saved the company tens of thousands of dollars. The company didn't want to dedicate/hire an actual programmer to maintain it, so they kept paying employees to manually scrape the web.

The crazy part is the next summer he interned at a different company and literally the exact same thing happened. He re-made the original script, saved tons of work, and the new company still didn't end up using it after he left.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#42

Post by jriordan42 »

franciscop wrote: post #16

Having read patio11/kalzumeus a lot (excelent blog posts and talks!), I'd say if he has a law named after him, it should be "charge more" or some fancier title like "you are not charging enough".

Or maybe a rule or such for general peeps that doesn't necessarily involve some special coffee-drinking in trendy Oregon? And what the heck is a "bed-and-breakfast type coffee tray"?

Or, Patio's Law, rephrsased: "Look at the very significant things you encounter with fresh eyes. You already know how to get to the crux of issues. When you get there, FRESH EYES!".

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#43

Post by _bxg1 »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #39
_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I 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.

Because it's your business logic. And your GUI builder. And your tax system. And your legal report generator. Etc.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#44

Post by vorpalhex »

dillonmckay wrote: post #33
MattGaiser wrote: post #14

I’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?

Bulk downloading and resizing photos in weird spreadsheets.

Managing attributes and taxonomies for ecommerce.

Capitalizable hour analysis for software projects.

That's just stuff from the last few weeks. None of these are hard to automate but the workflow integration is the tricky bit.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#45

Post by dpcan »

I keep running into organizations or industries that don't spend money on tech. They don't put it in the budget, or they choose to continue to use volunteers to accomplish tasks that really should be done with software.

I am in situation after situation where I want to create software to make someone's life easier, but I know that in doing so, I won't make any money and it will make my life harder.

I wish there was a way to make money creating software that could really help organizations that won't pay for the tech they need.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#46

Post by imgabe »

Not just software, but everything. Look around you. Everything around you was made somewhere. The example I like to use is shower curtain rings. Those plastic or metal things that hold your shower curtain onto the rod. Somewhere, there's a factory that makes those. The person who owns that factory is probably rich.

My first job out of college was working for a company that makes tilt-tray sorter systems. These are giant machines that go in warehouses and sort packages into, for example, different bays to go on to trucks to different places. It's like a little roller coaster for boxes. It was something that I had never even considered the existence of before I worked there. But someone has to make it.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#47

Post by cutler »

crimsonalucard wrote: post #39
_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I 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.

Try getting your average office worker to deal with an SQL database directly. No chance unless it only has a single table. A database without an interface tailored for a specific purpose is useless for office staff. I know this from experience having once tried to get office staff using pgAdmin to update the shiny new database I had designed for them.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#48

Post by Ice_cream_suit »

ivalm wrote: post #21
NikolaNovak wrote: post #13

Earlier 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…

Your firm (KP) does use SAP's BusinessObjects business intelligence software along with SAS analytics tools and to "support its data analysis activities against it's Oracle EHR system".

Since you are in the machine learning silo, your perspective may be a little skewed.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#49

Post by dillonmckay »

ladberg wrote: post #41
dillonmckay wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are always looking for ideas! Can you give a few examples, please?

Not OP but I had a friend who has interned at a few record labels. He's not really a programmer, but knows enough about programming to know what kind of task should be automated. He described a portion of his job to me that he and a bunch of other entry-level workers spent a few hours a day doing (basically scraping and storing data off the internet to be sent to business people for analysis). I worked with him to de…

Does he get paid at the internships?

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#50

Post by Yhippa »

Kinrany wrote: post #26

This 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.

The ones I've seen are a right-place-right-time kind of things. One company I saw scanned and collected auto parts instructions to be searchable via a web UI. I'm not going to come up with that out of the blue. These people are close to a problem and figured out an automation step that adds a lot of value.
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