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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

#131

Post by pascalxus »

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.

>> "heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the place" This isn't the case from my experience. I've networked with and interviewed dozens of people. It's incredibly difficult to find worthwhile problems that can be automated and aren't already automated. And, even here in the bay area, people tend to react pretty negatively the moment you even mention "repetitive processes". No one likes automation: they associate it with getting fired. So, if you ask people about this, they tend to clam up and stop talking pretty quickly.

And when you get right down to it, and start having the type of deep dive talks need to have with potential customers, you'll quickly discover there's already solutions to almost every conceivable problem out there, even in the some of the most esoteric fields you can imagine.

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

#132

Post by ge96 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #11
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.

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…

> a text message to email system ... letting his office assistant manage invoices ... fulfill orders on the go without talking on the phone as his customers can just text him

Oh man... that's what I'm after, problems like that. Would be so neat even if it's small to see it get used(users) and the analytics/small income.

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

#133

Post by dspig »

jriordan42 wrote: post #42
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!".

> And what the heck is a "bed-and-breakfast type coffee tray"?

A tray loaded with tea and coffee making equipment and supplies, like you get in hotel rooms. Not a tray for carrying things around.

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

#134

Post by jogundas »

_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…

It seems that the market is big enough to allow unicorns making "plugins" like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation to emerge.

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

#135

Post by fulafel »

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…

There are smaller ERPs too, but I think often the real alternative is building something in-house tailored to your specific business.

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

#136

Post by MattGaiser »

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.

> This thread seems to suggest that there are heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the world and accessible to any software engineer.

I argue that they are. It is just that the dollar bills are stuck in the mud or hidden under a leaf or just down paths you rarely take.

The bottleneck is knowing about them. You need to be the kind of person who thinks everything is done poorly and then thinks of ways to do it better.

The other bottleneck is that extracting them frequently requires annoying human interaction, but if you are willing to do it endlessly, there is plenty to do. I'm not and I lose out on a lot of projects as I don't want to do that.

But I know some absolutely terrible software developers (i.e. expect to see your password in the source code kind of developer) who outearn most devs I know simply by selling vast amounts of solutions to the thousands of people they meet every year.

Spend the day talking to random shop owners. Spend the night hacking together a fix for them. Collect an ongoing fee.

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

#137

Post by hnick »

nathanbarry wrote: post #65

Thanks for mentioning ConvertKit! We're happily building our niche product for creators and growing quickly. Just a couple corrections, at the end of 2019 we were just under $20M ARR (Not $24M). Today we are at $22M ARR and 30,000 customers. You can see all our numbers (updated in realtime) here on Baremetrics: http://convertkit.baremetrics.com I'm happy to answer any questions.

Very surprised he hadn't heard of ConvertKit. It's usually in the running whenever I google for email marketing/automation software. Price seems reasonable too (but not for us, we're more newsletter-based rather than conversion-based so it doesn't really work out).

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

#138

Post by ge96 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #55
CyberDildonics wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

> in Wordpress with plugins

My first dev job we just crapped out WordPress sites, I mean WP was just a "headless CMS" pretty much, since it has auth/users/routing/editor out of the box. So we just built pretty pages/uis. It was interesting, in that level, the owners of the company were making bank. There was something I made that cost $30K and I was like wow... I was not paid anywhere near that. This other thing a single person developed was over 6 figures... I think that's an example of selling value over quantified time(within reason).

Oh and with WooCommerce you again had this "headless" shopping system and you could throw your own styles on it.

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

#139

Post by MattGaiser »

pascalxus wrote: post #131
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.

>> "heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the place" This isn't the case from my experience. I've networked with and interviewed dozens of people. It's incredibly difficult to find worthwhile problems that can be automated and aren't already automated. And, even here in the bay area, people tend to react pretty negatively the moment you even mention "repetitive processes". No one likes automation: they associate it with…

The Bay Area would have far fewer easy problems as every 2nd person is a developer. It is fished out.

> people tend to react pretty negatively the moment you even mention "repetitive processes". No one likes automation: they associate it with getting fired.

Those aren't the people you should be talking to.

> you'll quickly discover there's already solutions to almost every conceivable problem out there, even in the some of the most esoteric fields you can imagine.

That is irrelevant for most as you sell them the implementation of that solution then. It is a $20 bill, not a Y-Combinator worthy idea.

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

#140

Post by MattGaiser »

ge96 wrote: post #138
MattGaiser wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

> in Wordpress with plugins My first dev job we just crapped out WordPress sites, I mean WP was just a "headless CMS" pretty much, since it has auth/users/routing/editor out of the box. So we just built pretty pages/uis. It was interesting, in that level, the owners of the company were making bank. There was something I made that cost $30K and I was like wow... I was not paid anywhere near that. This other thing a si…

Oh yes.

My aunt paid $8000 for nothing more than a Wordpress gallery for her business and paid $100 for every change she wanted to make.

People who don't know tech will pay a lot for it.

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