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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

#51

Post by ivalm »

Ice_cream_suit wrote: post #48
ivalm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, but lots of people don’t interact with it and would not know about it. The fact a company uses it doesn’t mean most engineers would know about it.

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

#52

Post by ivalm »

_bxg1 wrote: post #23
ivalm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

And was that a FAAMNG? Presumably the larger, "new-wave" tech companies roll their own solutions of some kind

I work for a large healthcare company. My point is not whether we use it (as another poster pointed out we apparently use a product that was acquired by SAP), it’s that lots of people might not know all of the business software that is used for various reasons.

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

#53

Post by 29athrowaway »

> “Wait until you find out about the $100 million company that chops all the pre-cut fruit you buy in supermarkets,” he said.

Imagine you harvest 1 fruit, chop it and package it, and then duplicate the result millions of times. Then each time you sell your chopped fruit, it's somehow teletransported directly to the customer.

That's software.

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

#54

Post by logicslave »

Kinrany wrote: post #38
juped wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

These bills dont exist, they are an oasis. I dont believe in the idea that easy millions is just laying around

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

#55

Post by MattGaiser »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #40
MattGaiser wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

V1 skimped on many of the things we might consider requirements such as preventing SQL injection. For a long time the username and password for this service consisted of hard coded if statements for each client. Plenty of plaintext passwords. Default admin logins. Even seen a frontend password checker with jQuery.

So it isn't software we would consider production acceptable. The code quality is atrocious. None of these people I know who do this would ever get hired as a software engineer by any company that does a coding interview.

But you pair their can-do attitude with a willingness to sell and tell them to use Django so they can get away with not knowing a lot about key software concepts, and you can make a living off selling niche atrocious software.

Plus, 90% of what most small businesses need could be replicated in Wordpress with plugins.Plenty of money there too.

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

#56

Post by devin »

cambalache wrote: post #34
_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…

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, u…

Good luck! You're time to market and the sunk cost fallacy are overwhelmingly against you.

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

#57

Post by RickS »

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.

For software people, the missing link is knowledge of a domain. Not domain expertise, the rare part is merely knowing that domains even exist to be searched for $20 bills.

The article mentions actuarial software for funeral homes. In retrospect, of course that's a thing, but asked to name low-hanging domains for lifestyle software businesses, few of us would ever arrive at that answer, let alone in the first 500 guesses. And is it sexy enough that we'd stake our livelihood on it?

I'm reminded of this XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1425/

People in these small niches can't easily tell the difference between things that are too hard to be worth the money vs things that are solved by a for loop in an afternoon, and they don't talk about their work in a way that makes it obvious that there's gold in the hills.

This is one reason that user research is an entire field that gets paid almost like engineering: framing the problem can be just as hard as the problem itself.

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

#58

Post by kondro »

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.

A lot of it is developers not understanding, being aware of (or simply being uninterested in) the problems other businesses face.

And businesses not knowing what _can_ be done with software to commission developers to solve it for them (or if they do, the lack of empathy from the developer ends up with them building a half-assed solution).

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

#59

Post by tlb »

The metal economy is huge. Almost every product requires metal. But metallurgists don't take home a big fraction of it.

What's special about the software economy is that people who write the software take home a large fraction of it. Maybe more than half, depending how you count. Which is unprecedented.

It's not just because software can be zero marginal cost. Musicians don't take home half of music revenue. In most creative industries, the creatives take home less than 1/10th.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

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

#60

Post by _bxg1 »

I have to think there are lots and lots of industries ripe for disruption or even for their first taste of software, and it's just that they're outside the radar of the vast majority of engineers. Industries you never ever hear about unless you're an insider. Maybe we need some mechanism for cross-pollinating people from "deep industry" with entrepreneurs. Many of the "visible" ones have already been saturated to death with startups, and it's just because those are what software people happen to be aware of.
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