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

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

secondbreakfast.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 445 posts

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

#101

Post by 1cvmask »

dvdhsu wrote: post #27
_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…

Hey! I'm David, the editor of the post you linked to. If there are any other topics you're interested in learning about, please let me know! We wrote another one on Salesforce ( https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/ ) that was well received on HN too ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115 ). We were thinking about writing about Marketo / marketing automation solutions next. (I'm david AT retool.c…

Where is most of your adoption coming from? Which verticals? Which horizontal groups?

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

#102

Post by qppo »

tootie wrote: post #30
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.

I've seen this even at technology companies. It's like our devs hours are valuable so we can't invest them in something everyone is comfortable doing with a spreadsheet already.

This happens to me a lot, but it's basically a kind of technical debt. Most of the time the upfront time investment to automate something properly versus doing it manually is hard to justify. Especially if it's a task that only I understand and now I need to document the problem and the automation instead of just the problem.

Business logic doesn't make for elegant APIs that I can hide behind a script and throw on a server, even if it's repetitive or tedious.

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

#104

Post by mokus »

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…

> The perspective “of you haven’t worked with SAP you are in a small org” is wrong.

The fact that you are arguing against this might be why you are getting downvoted. The original comment was saying “if you are in a small org you probably haven’t worked with SAP”, which is not the same thing.

Edit for further clarification: I can see how it might look like they were arguing what you stated, but it was more of a Bayesian inference. Many HN readers are at a small company, therefore a plausible reason that an arbitrary HN reader might not have heard of SAP would be that they are in the large pool of HN readers that are {in small companies and, therefore, do not work with SAP}

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

#105

Post by routerl »

Pmop wrote: post #74
CyberDildonics wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

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).

I'm only a couple of years down the road from where you are, currently looking for my third dev job, having started with a 5 month stint in testing, now doing full-stack web stuff.

If you're having trouble getting your foot in the door, like I did, I'd recommend looking at software developer in test jobs. Depending on the company, you'll get a chance to touch a few different codebases (in my case, I got to learn Swift and Objective-C, and sharpen my Java), and you'll get to work on a team, using common tools you might not have been exposed to yet (e.g. Jira). It's a great, relatively low-stakes way to get into the industry.

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

#106

Post by improv32 »

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.

There is a huge amount of these $20 bills lying around in fact. The thing is they're not that easy to pick up. These ERP systems are often fairly bespoke, designed for the workflow and needs of specific industries, or even specific niches in industries.

I work for one of these bespoke ERP companies, our niche is CNC machine shops (huge industy you don't hear much about). Our software was grown organically out of tools we made to manage our own CNC shop, spun out into its own company. That deep domain knowledge is what allows us to make a competitive product.

If this kind of stuff interests you we're hiring: https://www.proshoperp.com/company/careers/

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

#107

Post by m463 »

_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…

A friend of mine worked for Sun in the late 90's and mentioned SAP to me.

He told me companies would buy top-of-the-line (overpriced) hardware and pay a premium to get SAP up and running, because they would plug their company into it and recoup their costs almost overnight. It would just do say currency conversions or other super-boring non-core-business things better and save a pile of cash.

You can't save yourself rich, but sometimes the difference between a profitable quarter and a horrendous loss might be your accounting software or your tax software...

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

#108

Post by _lx4l »

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 have an "internal systems" team at my current company to solve this problem. The product manager for the team knows everyone and keeps tabs on what's being done that could be automated. It's not used to replace people (at least it hasn't been yet) rather it's used to allow the team to stay the same size and scale up their operations to meeting the growing business demands.

I think many companies could benefit from a team like this.

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

#109

Post by ianmcgowan »

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

If you had kids of the right age, into Phineas and Ferb, you'd know those little plastic bits are called aglets ;_)
Post reply on HN