Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by ge96 » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:44 AM UTC

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).

It was hard for me to start too(no degree). I freelanced first online, it was not easy/I did not make enough to live on(had to wash plates), but that was "proof" of paid work at the time then I got into an agency doing front end work. Now I'm a contractor SWE at a "local" corp, got picked up by a recruiter through Linked In.

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

#142

Post by MattGaiser » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:45 AM UTC

bsder wrote: post #15

That's because this stuff isn't valuable because it's software, it's valuable because of "business value" and expensive because of "customer support". Seriously. I can list tons of things that are reasonably profitable, but I, personally, don't want to do the hard work of customer support so I won't even start.

> Seriously. I can list tons of things that are reasonably profitable, but I, personally, don't want to do the hard work of customer support so I won't even start.

This in itself is a business idea. We need an Uber for Sales Support Staff that entrepreneurs can just rent by the hour.

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

#143

Post by MattGaiser » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:46 AM UTC

ladberg wrote: post #41

dillonmckay wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not OP but I had a friend who has interned at a few record labels. He's not really a programmer, but knows enough about programming to know what kind of task should be automated. He described a portion of his job to me that he and a bunch of other entry-level workers spent a few hours a day doing (basically scraping and storing data off the internet to be sent to business people for analysis). I worked with him to de…

Oh, many companies have only themselves to blame for being blown away by technology.

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

#144

Post by tree3 » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:47 AM UTC

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's special about the software economy is that people who write the software take home a large fraction of it

I don't think this is true. Take all the non-tech companies that rely on software and hire tons of engineers, such as insurance and banking.

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

#145

Post by secondbreakfast » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:49 AM UTC

hnick wrote: post #137

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).

i have now! my business partner introduced me to it, and we are happy convertkit customers. fantastic product.

the crazy thing to me is none of my friends have heard of them.

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

#146

Post by MattGaiser » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:51 AM UTC

blhack wrote: post #12

I’ve been saying this for years. There are THOUSANDS of small businesses out there who are mostly being ignored. Many, many, many companies still see shared excel spreadsheets on a windows shared drive as a technical innovation.

> Many, many, many companies still see shared excel spreadsheets on a windows shared drive as a technical innovation.

Not just small ones...

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

#147

Post by ge96 » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:51 AM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #140

ge96 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Man whoever sold that sounds like they made bank. I'm not sure what upkeep you have to deal with regarding Wordpress security but yeah. Sounds like it's low-risk enough generally eg. just show pictures.

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

#148

Post by MattGaiser » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:52 AM UTC

dpcan wrote: post #45

I keep running into organizations or industries that don't spend money on tech. They don't put it in the budget, or they choose to continue to use volunteers to accomplish tasks that really should be done with software. I am in situation after situation where I want to create software to make someone's life easier, but I know that in doing so, I won't make any money and it will make my life harder. I wish there was a…

A lot of it really comes down to explaining that labor cost is equally a cash cost compared to spending on software.

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

#149

Post by runawaybottle » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:58 AM UTC

save_ferris wrote: post #83

whateveracct wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

AI-driven software development down the road could theoretically commoditize developer skills. I sometimes wonder how many decisions I make per day that an AI could replicate in some repeatable way. Who knows, but nothing lasts forever.

We should technically be the last to be automated. We’ll destroy other labor systematically over decades, and then finally ourselves.

We seem to be subconsciously precocious about our fate too, as we deprecate things at a faster and faster rate.

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

#150

Post by icelancer » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:00 AM UTC

shp0ngle wrote: post #86

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…

I like the TV Series “Rotten” on netflix... it basically shows every food, fruit, meat, vegetable, you name it, is actually heavily controlled by cartels and mafias. I had no idea there were mafia cartels that had wars about avocados .

Oh yeah, for sure. It's all just land, which is controlled by mafias or corporate-type entities. United Fruit being the major wakeup call for everyone who reads about that situation.