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

121–130 of 445 posts

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

#121

Post by sidlls »

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…

" people who write the software take home a large fraction of it. Maybe more than half, "

Where do you get that figure? The vast majority of people writing software are not paid enough salary + benefits to come anywhere close to 50% of the revenue their work is responsible for earning.

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

#122

Post by MattGaiser »

_lx4l wrote: post #108
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…

One of my four jobs was on such a team. Unfortunately, they canned it (after I left) as they couldn't figure out what it did.

If my team of 8 devs had just one dedicated to improving infrastructure and processes, we could probably increase our overall output by 30% in a year.

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

#123

Post by beckingz »

logicslave wrote: post #54
Kinrany wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are millions laying around.

But it takes a long long time to pick them up.

"overnight successes" can take years.

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

#124

Post by hnick »

MattGaiser wrote: post #94
gonzo41 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The challenge we faced (for the two days we tried to hack together a solution) wasn’t so much the OCR but the fact that we couldn’t standardize the form as we were onboarding people with the documents from other banks. Our requirement was that the the software would need to read the number of separating lines in the table and output accordingly. Maybe it can do this, idk. I was an intern at the time. We were using te…

I worked somewhere that did something similar. Their product would scan and extract data from documents. Even working with the banks and companies who produced the documents, there were very stringent requirements (like identifying marks on pages to tell what document type we are looking at, pages being fed in the correct order, etc). Plus the ability to handle degraded, damaged, or bad copies. It's apparently one of those things that seems easy at a glance but the edge cases end up employing a whole department (they had people to review the scans and press OK or correct the data). It was a legacy system and I think a newer rewrite could get further but I'm wary about saying it could be fully automated.

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

#125

Post by MattGaiser »

Eugr wrote: post #114
MattGaiser wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge we faced (for the two days we tried to hack together a solution) wasn’t so much the OCR but the fact that we couldn’t standardize the form as we were onboarding people with the documents from other banks. Our requirement was that the the software would need to read the number of separating lines in the table and output accordingly. Maybe it can do this, idk. I was an intern at the time. We were using te…

There are commercial OCR software packages that can do it. FineReader is one example (and it's been around for ages).

FineReader seems like it would have done the job.

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

#126

Post by MattGaiser »

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…

Metal economy is huge, but there are inputs. Software engineers have no inputs into our projects besides our work and some hardware and electricity. A developer is 99% of the cost of a piece of software.

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

#127

Post by hnick »

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?

Because once they get involved they're often not worth picking up.

I think there's a lot of stuff out there that would provide value to both parties if they could simply connect. Something like Gumtree or Craigslist is an attempt to capitalise on this.

e.g. I have a broken machine. It'll be useful to someone for spare parts, to fix and resell (or for fun), as a placeholder (since it sort of works) until they get something better. I'd probably give it away. But dealing with all the time wasters on such platforms makes me want to just toss it.

It's similar for some ideas where there is definitely profit to be had, but simply connecting with the customer, convincing them that it will help them, convincing them you're actually honest, etc etc, all costs more than it's worth.

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

#128

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

ivalm wrote: post #51
Ice_cream_suit wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Companies that make things often have components managed by the ERP system. This flows down to the engineers. A software shop never deals with such things.

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

#129

Post by aabhay »

chii wrote: post #75
Swizec wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)!

Yeah, now multiply 28 billion by... three cents.

Also, just because an industry brings in lots of revenue doesn’t make it a good industry. I’m sure there’s trillions of dollars exchanging hands in the plastic bag market, but I’m also sure that the margins are getting squeezed so tight that even a PhD in OR couldn’t find a percentage point to optimize. The margin per bag is essentially zero.

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

#130

Post by hnick »

chadash wrote: post #20
voidfunc wrote: post #5

This does not just apply to software..., tons of small and medium sized businesses and opportunities out there. For engineers you will most likely never notice them if you're caught up in the Silicon Valley / VC thing. Of course it requires getting out of your comfort zone... a lot of dev's just want to exchange labor for cash and grind out code because it is comfortable and cozy (right now). There are tons of small…

I spoke to a guy recently who works for a company doing $300 million revenue/year as a wholesale distributor of internet networking equipment (think finger optic cables and equipment for housing them underground). Their customers are the ISPs. The company is privately owned and not venture backed so you'll never hear of them unless you are in that business.

> The company is privately owned and not venture backed so you'll never hear of them unless you are in that business.

Is the implication that venture backing needs growth so they get heavily involved in the media circus? I suppose that makes sense. I've always liked these "shadow industries", I've run into a few personally looking for things like special cut metal or wholesale pie crust or curtain rails.

Post reply on HN