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

191–200 of 445 posts

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

#191

Post by hnick »

JoshuaDavid wrote: post #178
hnick wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

90% automated is sometimes 90% as good as fully automated. It's not always the case, there are cases where hitting that 100% enables you to do things that were just not possible at all before, but sometimes it is. Recognizing those cases where a 90% solution is a 90% improvement at a 10% cost is a valuable skill.

Yes it's also part of the reason I prefer coding for myself. I can ignore a lot of "what ifs" and edge cases because I'm always there to pick up the mess if something happens. I get to focus on the stuff that makes an impact and forget the idiot-proofing :)

Or said another way, it can be fun and also effective to "Do Things That Don't Scale" [http://paulgraham.com/ds.html].

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

#193

Post by liotier »

improv32 wrote: post #106
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 tool…

> These ERP systems are often fairly bespoke

That is the paradox with ERP: they are sold as off-the-shelf solutions but customization costs twice the licenses and always ends up producing a bespoke monster.

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

#194

Post by underdeserver »

MattGaiser wrote: post #126
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.

In other words, your value-added as a software engineer is significantly higher, as a fraction of the money in a transaction, than the metalworker's.

This is because of leverage. Implement software that speeds up a process by 20% once, and every time that process is used from then on the speedup adds value.

We're lucky to be working in a field that enables us to add a lot of value, for relatively little capital costs, and pocket a good share of the difference.

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

#195

Post by ladberg »

dillonmckay wrote: post #49
ladberg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does he get paid at the internships?

Yep, but not as well as tech internships. Still, the company was throwing money down the drain because they didn't know that even a semi-competent programmer could automate those jobs.

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

#196

Post by lifeisstillgood »

MandieD wrote: post #182
anonytrary wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m expecting our first in a few months, so I’ll pass this great idea along to my husband, a mechanical engineer.

All the best of luck with the birth, from all at HN. Remember to create them an account :-)

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

#197

Post by rorykoehler »

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.

Personally the biggest difficulty I have had is getting ops people to change their habits. Software is only useful if people use it and retrofitting software onto existing processes is infinitely more challenging than building a software driven company from the ground up.

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

#198

Post by arkadiytehgraet »

auggierose wrote: post #190
jimnotgym wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Almost certainly most operations accounts and tax filings could be fully auto generated from their bookkeeping - if the bookkeeping was good enough.' I firmly disagree. I am supposed to be reviewing accounts right now....accruals, prepayments, deferred income, the difference between capital and expense, capital allowances, R&D allowances, dividends vs salaries, consolidation of groups. The average bookkeeper is not…

That sounds all pretty trivial.

I wonder if you have worked as an accountant? Or at least took some intro courses in the area? Or at a bare minimum took a look at common corporate financial statements?

This is such a typical dismissive reaction by a person who has ZERO insights into the domain.

If it is so trivial, why don't you do it and disrupt the market? Some very trivial millions are waiting for you to just come and get them, what's holding you back?

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

#199

Post by auggierose »

arkadiytehgraet wrote: post #198
auggierose wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds all pretty trivial.

I wonder if you have worked as an accountant? Or at least took some intro courses in the area? Or at a bare minimum took a look at common corporate financial statements? This is such a typical dismissive reaction by a person who has ZERO insights into the domain. If it is so trivial, why don't you do it and disrupt the market? Some very trivial millions are waiting for you to just come and get them, what's holding yo…

I don't do it because I care more about my time these days than about making millions :-) And why would I want to do something that is so obviously boring?

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

#200

Post by giantDinosaur »

auggierose wrote: post #190
jimnotgym wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Almost certainly most operations accounts and tax filings could be fully auto generated from their bookkeeping - if the bookkeeping was good enough.' I firmly disagree. I am supposed to be reviewing accounts right now....accruals, prepayments, deferred income, the difference between capital and expense, capital allowances, R&D allowances, dividends vs salaries, consolidation of groups. The average bookkeeper is not…

That sounds all pretty trivial.

Trivial in the sense of integer multiplication being easy; non-trivial in that it's full of weird & wonderful business rules, many of which are barely written, and strange interactions between different markets and contracts etc.

Half of it is just the business & people skills to extract the necessary information. Harder than you'd think, and that's just asking people for stuff!

Post reply on HN