211–220 of 445 posts
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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?
Trivial stuff takes what, an hour, a week, a month at maximum to do? So you are trading the opportunity to be financially independent for the rest of your life for what, your free time on a span of one month? Yeah, that does sound reasonable.
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…
From an american point of view it doesn't make sense for the amount of capital investment to happen so quickly, but that does seem to be true. Entire products with complex supply chains.
Entire industries seem to be born and then completely die much much quicker than I thought possible.
I would love to understand how all that works more deeply. Seems interesting.
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> Except, that is, for the summer I interned at Hewlett-Packard. Not sure how it never came up there; maybe they just have their own equivalent system. When was this? Leo Apotheker became CEO of HP in 2010, after 22 years at SAP (two as CEO). He then presided over a sequence of colossal fuck-ups, lost 40% market cap, and was fired less than a year later. HP definitely knows about SAP, but I wouldn't be surprised if t…
He ran sales arms of SAP for 20 years, not SAP itself. After he became CEO of SAP itself he was fired after 2 years, then he joined HP amd he was fired from that after one year. Pretty rough end to his career there..
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.
This is similar to Gell-Mann amnesia in that I had relatively little to do with writing this law ;) (For what it's worth, I think it's likely descriptively accurate, but not sure it's an observation worth the namespace.)
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…
Highly customised, to the point that upgrades are impossible.
Extremely complex systems. So complex that vendor lock in is assured, and the lock in means big prices.
And yet a good business because ERP systems are at the core of any medium to big business.
It's grindy, boring, challenging without being fun work, often using non standard technologies that have been developed by the ERP systems vendor, which help ensure lock in.
ERP companies like SAP and Oracle are the absolute best at making money on services - they know how to charge huge huge amounts and get away with it. There's TONS of money there.
I wouldn't want to work in that area though.
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…
Having worked in food industry as IT about 20y ago, we used to have fragmented system portfolio, and were struggling to pull data from one system to another. The around 2002 management decided to switch to SAP. I remember working on the storage/capacity/CPU aspect of it (and mid-migration I left the company and completely missed on the SAP train in my career). That food company was providing milk, yogurt, cheese, juice, ice-cream to about 25mil people (customer base). That's SAP for you right there. So that 78% doesn't surprise me at all. I believe the remaining 23% is too small to invest that amount of $$$ nad just hasn't done it yet.
When you get the ability to "track every cucumber" from pick to sell, cut down on fraud, errors, be able to calculate every bit of profit, loss, why would you go anywhere else? I understand the initial cost may be hefty, but once you set it up (good and well), you can stop focusing on that, and see how to grow the business parts of your business, and not the admin.
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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.
They also sell some easy systems, like a LEGO car, but usually it's better to strip them down and reuse the parts of what you need is a house.
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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.
You periodically need to update the PHP version to keep up. I have a dormant personal website and maybe 1-2 years I have to go update the PHP when I get an email about it.