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

421–430 of 445 posts

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

#421

Post by marktangotango »

dragonwriter wrote: post #355
bluedino wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Written like a successful salesperson for competing ERP solution X, well done!

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

#422

Post by d-man »

save_ferris wrote: post #83
whateveracct wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would cause it to not last outside of precedent? In all those cases, it sounds like middlemen exist that corner the end-market that you gotta go through to make big money. How would that even work with software in the age of the internet, open source, and commodity cloud infra?

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.

I have doubts about AI driven end results, but I could totally see AI created domain specific languages

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

#423

Post by schnevets »

goto11 wrote: post #232
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…

Are these companies irrational? Perhaps, but there might also be an important point. A manual process is robust, fault tolerant, and easy to adjust to new circumstances or changing business requirements. A Python script is fixed, and they day it breaks down due to some slight change in scraped data, you have to pull in a developer to fix it. For a company without dedicated staff to support such automation, it is a hi…

Exactly - intern labor is cheap, flexible, and there's a "wax-on wax-off" mentality where they may learn by proxy but are also in a safe environment where they won't hurt themselves or the company. A script and the associated automation could become the expectation or could lead to a key-man-dependency-risk.

It may be lucrative for the friend to take the script and turn it into a product. but then they'll need to market, sell, document, optimize, and do a million other tasks.

There has always been a dead zone between "automated script that makes me work a bit more efficiently" and "product that can make everyone with this job work a bit more efficiently". Fortunately, new technology is narrowing this gap.

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

#424

Post by crimsonalucard »

youdonthavekids wrote: post #417
crimsonalucard wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you're a vile and horrible human being who doesn't know how to treat another person with respect. You're a sack of shit.

You're also vile. If you weren't vile you wouldn't call someone a sack of shit because they hurt your feelings on the internet. You've literally removed the humanity of someones father because you don't like how they spoke to you. That's the lowest you can go.

Sure my feelings are hurt. But my feelings are hurt because you deliberately wanted to hurt them.

Look deeply at the truth of the matter. The deep reality is that when I say your a sack of shit, it's more than just an insult... it's the truth. You came here with the intention to inflict pain. That is what you are.

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

#425

Post by ciceryadam »

kradroy wrote: post #392
_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…

I work for SAP and it's surprising to me that not even other engineers in the Bay Area have heard of the company despite its campus in Palo Alto and their sponsorship of the "SAP Center" in San Jose. Do you file expenses? You probably use SAP Concur. Do you order office materials or equipment? You may use SAP Ariba. Have you taken part in interviewing a candidate coworker, or have you done yearly career goal planning…

Concur, Ariba and SuccessFactors are acquisitions, and only SuccessFactors is fully integrated under the SAP Umbrella. Here in Prague Concur and Ariba have their standalone subsidiary companies, with Separate HQs in different parts of town.

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

#426

Post by ciceryadam »

wdb wrote: post #380
_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…

TfL, BP, Shell etc run on SAP. Had good fun messing around with SAP over there

ExxonMobil runs on it as well.

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

#427

Post by Nemi »

tripzilch wrote: post #419
NikolaNovak wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>not once have I ever heard of an SAP implementation going well. Sometimes it depends who you ask; I found that hands-on people on the ground and SMEs tend to be very negative about it, for personally valid reasons - it's a lot of work, it doesn't go smoothly , and it disrupts and changes what and how they do it. However, there are quite a few ERP implementations where the top-level stakeholders feel the results are…

Now you're describing an implementation that is disruptive to the majority of employees "on the ground" and only worthwhile to the top-level stakeholders. Only the top-level stakeholders felt the results were worthwhile the disruption and pain -- that they did not suffer . But have you ever heard of one going well ? As in, not just worthwhile to a tiny minority of the people on the top? Yeah I bet it makes stuff more…

Another way to look at it is, the top-level stakeholders are responsible for the business and not just themselves or the lives of their employees. An effective leader is thinking about what is best for the business. Not just themselves or any one part of the business.

And maybe, just maybe, what is right for the business is bad for the majority of the staff. At least in the short term. I know that is a bitter pill to swallow, but it is reality.

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

#428

Post by sidlls »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #406
mikekchar wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. However, it may or may not include equity depending on how things are set up.

Do you mean employee equity? Isn't that usually considered part of total remuneration?

It’s not a cost as a function of revenue the same way cash, perks, and other benefit are.

It’s also not clear that typical grants are enough to close the gap to “more than half” as the op remarked.

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

#429

Post by Gollapalli »

jamestimmins wrote: post #377
vorpalhex wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bulk downloading and resizing photos in weird spreadsheets. Managing attributes and taxonomies for ecommerce. Capitalizable hour analysis for software projects. That's just stuff from the last few weeks. None of these are hard to automate but the workflow integration is the tricky bit.

Do you know why they don't just use an existing API that does image resizing automatically? Presume it's the integration challenge, but I'm curious if you know /why/. Also, what does "Capitalize hour analysis" mean?

I doubt they know such an API even exists (or what an API is!). Most companies aren't run by hackers, assuming there's an API that does the thing they want to do isn't the natural response.

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

#430

Post by adius »

_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…

This is kind of how I felt when I started to learn Haskell
Post reply on HN