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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

#351

Post by momokoko »

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…

Most of the people writing software for the companies listed in this article are freelance workers in lower wage companies. They make close to, and sometimes less than minimum wage for high wage nations.

Startups pay well because speed is so important and faang pays well because their margins are enormous and the risk of those shrinking is worth paying top dollar for the absolute best talent in the world.

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

#352

Post by pkalinowski »

gruez wrote: post #297
chii wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry there's 7 billion people on this planet, and most of them wear at least 1 pair of shoes (so 4 end bits), which means there's about 4x7,000,000,000 pieces of these things. I'm surprised it's only a 800,000,000/year industry! That means they are able to produce it so cheap (i.e., less than 2c per bit, which is an over-estimate)!

You assume that on average, each person buys 1 pair of laced shoes per year. How realistic is this? Maybe affluent consumers in developed countries can afford 1 pair of shoe per year, but I doubt it's affordable for consumers in developing countries (where most of the world's population are). Even in developed countries, how many of those shoes have laces? Many women's shoes don't have any laces, for instance.

You know, it's called estimation. Maybe come up with better number?

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

#353

Post by NDizzle »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #283
youdonthavekids wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"SQL doesn't"... you are correct, SQL can't figure out how much tax you need to pay across 9 tax jurisdictions. SQL can't tell me the best way for my warehouse picking robots to move across the floor based on the layout of the warehouse and what others products are being picked right this second plus over the next few minutes. The list is really endless of what SAP will do and SQL won't. It would take decades to repl…

I mean I guess you can throw all that functionality in a bunch of triggers but that would slow down your database to a crawl every time one record updated.

Have the triggers publish to service broker!

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

#354

Post by tootie »

qppo wrote: post #102
tootie wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this even at technology companies. It's like our devs hours are valuable so we can't invest them in something everyone is comfortable doing with a spreadsheet already.

This happens to me a lot, but it's basically a kind of technical debt. Most of the time the upfront time investment to automate something properly versus doing it manually is hard to justify. Especially if it's a task that only I understand and now I need to document the problem and the automation instead of just the problem. Business logic doesn't make for elegant APIs that I can hide behind a script and throw on a…

There's also the risk of allocating a team of folks with spare cycles, having the get half way through the work, then getting pulled into billable work and leaving it unfinsihed.

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

#355

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

> 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'.

More generally, a good way to botch a business transformation project is to select technical solutions without a keen grasp of how they fit your business need, and to bullheadedly stick with those solutions as friction is revealed with the business needs.

Both distorting the business around vendor software and ending up continuously fighting with the vendor software throughout th effort (both of which are commonly cited “how to fail” routes) are clear (though superficially opposite) symptoms of that same failure occurring upstream in the process.

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

#356

Post by MattGaiser »

cosmodisk wrote: post #342
MattGaiser wrote: post #14

I’ve had four jobs in my life and have always been stunned by what is still done by hand. Every company had a task which could be heavily automated but was instead consuming 4-30 people. So if you think the software market is large, consider all the stuff software never reached.

I wrote a piece of code last year in probably no more than a few hours.Showed it to a few guys in my team.Instead of sharing my excitement,they were like "if you run this,what are we going to do then?". She was right,if I'd do it, the size of the team would be reduced by half.But then,what I'd get? Do I get a bonus the size of those employee's salary for 6 month? No.I'd get a grand or two and instead and a pat on a s…

Within the company, there is often no point. You want to be the guy selling it outside the company. You can easily claim tens of thousands for the same work then.

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

#357

Post by davee5 »

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…

Yes. The commodification of professional work is worth pointing out. I'm surprised by the percentage of people in this thread who think the SW industry is exceptional. It tells me a lot about the fictions people want to tell themselves in an industry that is still relatively novel.

By contrast I'm a HW builder (mechanical engineer / industrial designer / design manager). I make good comp but maybe 70% of what my similarly leveled colleagues in SW do. The vast majority of the arguments in here still apply to my work, with a little less focus on maintenance. And yet my job role's comp is in a slow decline. Why? Because it's fully commoditized.

Anecdote: I used to work for a HW focused VC leading their internal incubator/consultancy's physical design team. One of our ML focused investments got acquired for a ton of money and every other startup in the building wanted to know how well compensated the team was going to be. It's odd to see some people at the water cooler suddenly be worth millions when your startup is still grinding, it makes for stark contrast and a very real "what if" to the onlookers. One of the Sr MEs at a struggling startup was clearly jealous and lamented to me, "man, screw machine learning, how come nobody is paying me a million bucks for my work?" To which I said "let me ask you something, when you were studying mech-e in school, did you ever use steam tables?" yeah. "Did you learn about the Carnot cycle?" yeah. "Have you considered the fact that our industry is 200 years old? It stands to reason that our jobs are not hot shit anymore. Be glad you like your work and are still paid well; ignore the new kids if you can."

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

#358

Post by secondbreakfast »

ignoramous wrote: post #338

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 eff…

> a) how much you know that other people do not

this is a particularly confounding problem, and i haven't figured out a way to combat it.

it's so bad, that i'll often learn something new when scrolling twitter or clicking through wikipedia, and then immediately assume that 1) i'm the last person to the party, everybody else already knows, and 2) forget what it was like not-knowing this fact mere seconds before.

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

#359

Post by cushychicken »

nojito wrote: post #261
miki123211 wrote: post #249

Basecamp is a famous example of this. It's a pretty popular project management software, 56 employees at this point if I remember correctly, probably millions in revenue. It's a tiny, bootstrapped company, no investors breathing down their necks, no IPOs, nothing. And they're one of the few companies who actually have principles, are committed to privacy etc.

Because it’s almost impossible to switch out of Basecamp and use a competitor. The vast majority of companies like this have perfected the lock-in strategy to ensure that their customers can never leave.

I don't think this is correct. They have stated in several of their books that they expect their customers to outgrow BaseCamp.

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

#360

Post by richardwhiuk »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #192
moron4hire wrote: post #63

Jesus Christ, it's almost like the US economy is mostly ran by small businesses, what the fuck.

Actually the trend is in the opposite direction, towards more enterprise size businesses.

Both are probably true - it's probably true that most of the US economy is SMEs, and that over time enterprises become a larger factor of the economy
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