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

#331

Post by sokoloff » Wed, May 13, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

NikolaNovak wrote: post #280

sq_ wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of something I read while helping a business major friend with a case study a while back. One of the readings she had as background mentioned that companies like SAP that sell ERP are almost selling the process/workflow more than the actual software. Part of me wonders if these things are more of a "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" thing than anything else. Are people buying the workflow because…

1. You're absolutely right - you're buying software, a set of best practices, workflows, and a proven way to implement and use them. 2. HR, Finance, all the backoffice stuff - that's not your competitive advantage. It's not your core business. You just want to do it as efficiently and quietly as possible. 3. Therefore, in ideal case, a company realizes it is not a special snowflake, buys an ERP, implements it as vani…

The process often derails at exactly the “implement it as vanilla as possible” stage. Usually because someone doesn’t want to change what they do and someone else doesn’t care enough to make them change.

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

#332

Post by hckr_news » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #303

ehnto wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of HN topics are about tooling for startups. Those tools are sometimes startups themselves, which can can make HN feel like a bit of a bubble I think. Software for software developers can be a huge focus here, but it's just scratching the surface of software for the rest of the world. I was startled when I applied for a job at a company in my city, and they told me their product was entirely API connectors for…

You won't need sexy VC capital if you can build a business that runs a good profit. Honestly I'm getting more and more cynical of the SF bubble that doesn't seem to be about making great software, but about getting a lot of investor money and going public - prioritizing short-term profits at the expense of the consumer and employees.

Agreed. Running a company with a sustainable business model and healthy profits, not being propped up by VC money would probably do the local economy of one such a city perhaps more good.

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

#333

Post by save_ferris » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #149

save_ferris wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We should technically be the last to be automated.

I disagree, developer work will be automated as soon as it is technologically feasible, especially given the high cost of software development labor. I foresee AI software development platforms starting to take over new application development at some point, building applications that humans have minimal access to the source of. Existing apps by humans will likely need human maintenance until AI is able to reason about larger legacy applications.

We’re already starting to see no-code apps taking off, and AI will drive the proliferation of that technology as it becomes more sophisticated.

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

#334

Post by Kye » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:01 PM UTC

risyachka wrote: post #305

jayjader wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue the comparison still holds for developers of video games - as long as the game's code is not touched upon release. Used to be the norm, nowadays admittedly seems to be disappearing.

Also the amount of skilled professionals needed to write a song and to write a game is slightly put - different. A song surely requires a skilled professional. But a game required dozens of those, with years of experience and lots fo time. Creative industries get way lower pay because the skill level needed is low compared to many others, like law, medicine etc. If you are talented you can paint great pictures or be…

Like games and software, the staff needed to make a song varies a lot.

If you want your [game, software, song, ...] to reach a certain level of polish and fame, you need a similar number of people working on it. Mixing, mastering, recording, composing. You need someone who's very good with sheet music and knowledgeable about all parts of an orchestra if you have any orchestral parts you want played on real instruments.

And so on.

Can I make a song in a week that'll impress a few tens of thousands people? Sure. People write in to me all the time saying "this is just what I needed!" They don't notice I banged it out in Ableton in an hour because it's what they needed. It's what I needed too, so it was easy to make it good enough. Just like you can make a game or a piece of software in a week that'll scratch a lot of people's itches even if it's not perfect.

Recently, I got back into photography, and it's the same. I can take a great picture on my own and impress a lot of people, but most famous photographers have a staff that rivals the biggest non-unicorn SV startups. Editors, lighters, second (or third) shooters, general A/V crew, marketing, office staff, etc.

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

#335

Post by economicslol » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:03 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #303

ehnto wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of HN topics are about tooling for startups. Those tools are sometimes startups themselves, which can can make HN feel like a bit of a bubble I think. Software for software developers can be a huge focus here, but it's just scratching the surface of software for the rest of the world. I was startled when I applied for a job at a company in my city, and they told me their product was entirely API connectors for…

You won't need sexy VC capital if you can build a business that runs a good profit. Honestly I'm getting more and more cynical of the SF bubble that doesn't seem to be about making great software, but about getting a lot of investor money and going public - prioritizing short-term profits at the expense of the consumer and employees.

But my Blockchain Deep Learning Dog Walking app is going to change the world!! I went to Stanford so I must be right! /s

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

#336

Post by glitcher » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:05 PM UTC

gonzo41 wrote: post #80

MattGaiser wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure A tool where you are given a picture/scan of a table and it spits out a table that can be pasted into Excel. This was at a bank where numerous people spent half their days manually typing in scanned documents into the same table in Excel. You would double a $70,000 a year financial analyst's productivity with this. A portal to manage employee and employer documents. I.e where both you and your employer can easil…

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.

We used tesseract ocr, plus other image processing libraries to improve ocr's chances, and although we were close to usable results there were still many challenges. One major problem was that different data sources had completely different page layouts, and often times the original documents were out of reach and the client only had available the scans of fax transmissions!

The bottom line was that we were able to achieve very good results consistently, but the margin of error was not acceptable for our specific use case.

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

#337

Post by economicslol » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

_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's like Salesforce, that crap is ubiquitous in large companies. Have you ever used it? It's a nightmarishly clunky piece of trash and yet Salesforce is a 150B behemoth.

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

#338

Post by ignoramous » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

More patio11 laws: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/936615043126370306.html

A variant of the current law also makes an appearance:

"The amount of money flowing through capitalism would astound you. The number and variety of firms participating in the economy would astound you."

My picks are:

"Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run. These are simultaneously true."

"You radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it."

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

#339

Post by wolco » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:11 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #303

ehnto wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of HN topics are about tooling for startups. Those tools are sometimes startups themselves, which can can make HN feel like a bit of a bubble I think. Software for software developers can be a huge focus here, but it's just scratching the surface of software for the rest of the world. I was startled when I applied for a job at a company in my city, and they told me their product was entirely API connectors for…

You won't need sexy VC capital if you can build a business that runs a good profit. Honestly I'm getting more and more cynical of the SF bubble that doesn't seem to be about making great software, but about getting a lot of investor money and going public - prioritizing short-term profits at the expense of the consumer and employees.

Have you seen your local software? It is rarely about making great software.. good enough.

Open source tries to make great software. Does the best job.

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

#340

Post by H1Supreme » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:15 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #276

NikolaNovak wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if it helps understand the ecosystem and its seeking oddness, this is the crucial part of article: "Implementing ERP isn’t just a purchasing decision: it’s committing to redoing how you handle operations. Installing the software is the easy part; adjusting the whole company’s workflow is the most of the work." Don't think of erp and implementing it as a software development challenge. Sure, Developers can fscrew…

A good way for your organization to completely botch an ERP implementation is to fight the system every step of the way because your business is 'special'. Many people end up abusing customizations to the point of trying to emulate their old system in the new one, and nobody wins.

You just brought back some painful memories. At an old company of mine, I helped migrate a legacy system to SAP (of all things!), and they fought it every step of the way.

Well, management did. Every other phrase they uttered was "The old system did it this way" or "I used to just press F2". The pushback to learning something new was unreal.

Nevermind the fact that multi-step processes were reduced to a simple button click. Or that inventory and customer management were orders of magnitude better. The old system!! The old system did it another way!