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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

#71

Post by abiogenesis »

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…

I did that and was successful to some degree, but it's not easy. I would've done something else if I knew that back then.

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

#72

Post by thelibrarian »

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.

Why would you use an ecommerce platform instead of a regular SQL database?

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

#73

Post by austinl »

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.

Engineers are unaware of the needs of these businesses, and often, the businesses are unaware that it's possible to solve some of their problems with software. That's why successful engineer-founders often have prior industry experience, or a co-founder who is an expert in the given industry.

I remember working on a construction survey crew in high school, where all survey measurements were recorded by hand in notebooks, and then manually transferred to Excel to perform some trivial operations. The office had hundreds of notebooks lying around. The leadership had no idea it was possible to have an application built to solve something like this. Perhaps they're using something now — I sure hope so.

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

#74

Post by Pmop »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #9
Pmop wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be just the entry point for me, since I'm having a hard time at landing my 1st job as junior. I feel like I'll have a good time and lots of fun anyways. Any advice on how to approach clients? (I can do (full-stack) web development and solve problems/ optimize solutions with algorithms and meta-heuristics.)

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.

It is due to the fact that I have no, at least professional, experience. Well, at least that's what recruiters have been saying to me in the end of the interviewing process, after I got their take-home projects done. Working for small business seems the way to make money, while getting the chance to leave some paper trail (if this, hopefully, counts as professional experience).

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

#75

Post by chii »

Swizec wrote: post #61
imgabe wrote: post #46

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 gi…

You know the ends of shoeleaces, those little plastic bits? Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry Cardboard box industry in USA is bigger than the NFL, NHL, NBA, and the other major sports leagues combined

> Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry

there's 7 billion people on this planet, and most of them wear at least 1 pair of shoes (so 4 end bits), which means there's about 4x7,000,000,000 pieces of these things.

I'm surprised it's only a 800,000,000/year industry! That means they are able to produce it so cheap (i.e., less than 2c per bit, which is an over-estimate)!

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

#76

Post by rb808 »

_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…

The crazy thing is for most of the world people use Windows and SAP and firewalled intranets and no external email. Apple laptops and free access to the internet and SV culture is a tiny minority of what the world's computing looks like.

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

#77

Post by anonytrary »

imgabe wrote: post #46

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 gi…

When I have kids, I'm gonna play a game with them where we look at random stuff and try to make up how it got there, and then compare that to how it really got there. I bet if you did this consistently with kids during their formative years, it would be a great way to teach them about the world and the economy. My parents just had a huge book room with encyclopedias that I was expected to pick up and read.

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

#78

Post by whateveracct »

tlb wrote: post #59

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…

What would cause it to not last outside of precedent? In all those cases, it sounds like middlemen exist that corner the end-market that you gotta go through to make big money. How would that even work with software in the age of the internet, open source, and commodity cloud infra?

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

#79

Post by clairity »

_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…

most people would be similarly surprised that $1T-market-cap microsoft is a business & enterprise software company, rather than a consumer one. it's ~80-90% of their $130B in yearly revenue (hard to get more precise because of the way they report their numbers).

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

#80

Post by gonzo41 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #68
dillonmckay wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure A tool where you are given a picture/scan of a table and it spits out a table that can be pasted into Excel. This was at a bank where numerous people spent half their days manually typing in scanned documents into the same table in Excel. You would double a $70,000 a year financial analyst's productivity with this. A portal to manage employee and employer documents. I.e where both you and your employer can easil…

That first one can be done with teseract ocr pretty cheaply. I think a lot of people just don't know how much software can do. You just need to standardize the form and then there's a human data validation step in there.
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