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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

#361

Post by tcgv »

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…

You're in a delicate situation, since you'd be to blame for your co-workers potentially loosing their jobs. Nevertheless, doing nothing is also risky, since someone else from another department could show up and automate away your jobs leaving you in a hard place, and you won't have any control over that.

If you propose the automation yourself, and plan it's adoption within your team, you may have a chance of taking advantage of it, and even try to bring in more responsibilities within the company to your team to secure your teammates jobs.

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

#362

Post by tomnipotent »

fovc wrote: post #88
_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…

Coming from the opposite direction (mgmt consulting for big corps -> startup), I was very familiar with the ERP concept, but am still super confused by the ERP market. Every so often I look for an ERP for our company, but am always disappointed by the options. It seems there's an uncanny valley between Quickbooks and SAP, but maybe the issue is just one of discoverability. We've slowly stitched together an assortment…

Quickbooks will do you fine up to $100M in revenue or 8-10+ years in operation. When you cross either of those bridges, you should think about implementing a "real" ERP.

But this doesn't happen until your team (accounting/finance/CEO/CFO) start running into roadblocks in either piecing together financial statements, or the month close process starts taking weeks of manual labor, or there's a HUGE accounting issue and everyone discovers the forecast is way off and the company has been burning cash faster than expected.

At this point you have the organizational momentum to do the crazy amount of work required in getting an ERP up and running, which requires getting most of your business flowing into it so that it'll even be remotely useful (otherwise everyone goes back to Excel).

What needs to flow into it? Everything you're doing by hand to update your three sheets. You need to get revenue/income in there (sales orders, purchase orders etc.), product costs if you have them, payroll, bills (internet, office supplies). Hopefully you use something like Bill.com, and this becomes a (slightly) simpler process.

Maybe you have vendors in Europe where you pay in Euro, so you now also have to figure out how you're going to convert currencies. Maybe you have warranty on your products, so you have to balance accrual accounts. This list goes on, and on, and on.

Every company is different, and you might not even recognize the overlap between two ERP launches besides the fact that they're using SAP.

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

#363

Post by redblacktree »

webmaven wrote: post #300
gonzo41 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Several years ago I came across a pile of interesting-to-me US government data that consisted of scanned PDFs of paper forms (some filled out by hand, some with a typewriter, more recently with a computer). The paper forms change in layout and level of detail a few times over several decades, there are hundreds of sub-schema variations within each time period (yes, that means that a particular variant might have a si…

Can you not use software for the 80% that are amenable to it and humans for the other 20%?

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

#364

Post by TuringNYC »

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.

SAP was particularly successful because not only did they make money, but so did the Systems Integration partners.

At Accenture, for example, there were projects where 30-40 full time consultants were flown in from all over the country to do big SAP implementations.

...so you could see how Systems Integration partners heavily sold SAP products.

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

#365

Post by jjeaff »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #13
_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…

That is fascinating to me, because virtually all my friends have heard of SAP outside of IT - as users or recipients. My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc. At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very star…

I have heard of sap in tons of contexts in undergrad business classes, news articles, and things like that. Though I have never come across an implementation in the wild. Though my experience in large enterprise is limited.

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

#366

Post by cvlasdkv »

recursive wrote: post #346
cosmodisk wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The point is getting that thousand bucks before someone else does. Or to make the company efficient enough to survive in a market where the other company's already efficient.

helping your company save costs (at scale) is almost always stupid compared to selling that knowledge to other companies.

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

#367

Post by selimthegrim »

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 .

I assume you mean that town in Mexico? They had a quite a few articles in the US press about them.

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

#368

Post by horsie-bacon »

rb808 wrote: post #76
_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…

The crazy thing is for most of the world people use Windows and SAP and firewalled intranets and no external email. Apple laptops and free access to the internet and SV culture is a tiny minority of what the world's computing looks like.

as a designer working in enterprise side application development - so much this. So many design portfolios are geared towards consumer side apps but the world is powered by the most dry boring stuff.

[I finally got around to making an account after lurking for so long. Your post was the catalyst ]

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

#369

Post by ska »

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.

Software engineering skills alone are definitely not enough.

There are a ton of these heaps of bills, sure, but they aren't lying around on the floor so much as on hilltops and mountains, to abuse an analogy.

It may help to think of these opportunities as a form of technology arbitrage. In order to take advantage, one or more people have to a) understand the technology, b) understand the problem domain c) understand the workflows and d) identify and communicate effectively to the people who can actually make the decisions.

How many people do you know who are both competent and interested in all of these aspects? It's not that any of these skills are particularly rare, but they are rare in the same person and there aren't natural communities, for the most part, of people who can do all aspects.

Another issue is sometimes (often, really) the technology aspect is the smallest and least interesting part of the problem.

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

#370

Post by ntsplnkv2 »

allendoerfer wrote: post #307
mister_hn wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SAP was just nominated (together with Deutsche Telekom) the contractor for the official German Vivid tracking app (Covid-warn-App), just saying

I really don't get why they did not award an agency with a proven track record of delivering apps. If you choose one of the big ones, you still have high rates, but at least there is a chance of actually getting it done. SAP is known for incredibly long ongoing projects and Deutsche Telekom has a track record of destroying acquired online businesses. I would bet 10:1, that this project will fail.

Probably because SAP is a huge political force in Germany more than anything.
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