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

#371

Post by ntsplnkv2 » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

HenryBemis wrote: post #218

_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…

> ..78% of the world’s food all flow through SAP? 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 fo…

See this sounds good, and is why many execs are sold on it.

But because it is so massive, it's impossible to find talent that can actually implement it properly. That's IF your company doesn't require a ridiculous amount of customization.

Projects always run over-budget and over-time. Vendor lock-in becomes a huge problem. These companies solely exist to keep customers using their software and paying their service fees. They then provide just enough marketing buzzwords to justify it to execs who justify it to other execs.

If SAP is done right, it is very powerful, but it is seldom done right.

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

#372

Post by pc86 » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

shavingspiders wrote: post #252

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…

Another view of this - if the true purchase is of a group of workflows, are they purchasing for the things they know they need or the assurance that behemoth IBM/SAP/whatever has a process for whatever they didn't think about? Purchasing to minimise some future operational risk.

This is probably an understated benefit a lot of us in tech don't think about.

If you're selling widgets, and selling 100 units a month, there are growing pains on the path to 100 units a day and 100 units a minute that you can't anticipate, and that billion-dollar retailers have already figured out. So I think to the extent that physical B2C sales is pretty constant across industries, you know that if you're big enough to justify the investment in SAP or a similar ERP platform, there exists a process that you'll need 0.5, 1, or 5 years from now that they have and you can't really articulate today.

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

#373

Post by pembrook » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:54 PM UTC

Kinrany wrote: post #38

juped wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sales and marketing.

There seems to be more people doing sales/marketing than software engineers (though I don't have any numbers). Why aren't they picking up the bills?

Two things:

1) Being a non-technical founder is expensive

2) Being savvy at online marketing means you probably were able to figure out that the cost of customer acquisition was higher than the price people would be willing to pay for the product

The reason businesses do inefficient things is because humans are stupid habit-driven animals. To break them out of their habits, you have to assault them with expensive messaging and literally shake them until they realize you have built a better way.

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

#374

Post by shamano » Wed, May 13, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

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…

Isn't really anything your team could do? Usually there are lot of fronts people could work on and bring more revenue to the company. Try to find those to redirect your team and implement your solution.

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

#375

Post by sidlls » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #258

sidlls wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" people who write the software take home a large fraction of it. Maybe more than half, " Where do you get that figure? The vast majority of people writing software are not paid enough salary + benefits to come anywhere close to 50% of the revenue their work is responsible for earning.

In companies that actually manage to get to revenue, may be. But if you take together all the software companies, including many that have not yet and may never get to revenue at all, I think it would be much closer.

How so? The vast majority of software workers aren’t at VC or self-funded startups, nor do they work for small boutiques developing web/mobile apps or managing eCommerce deployments for local mom-n-pops. They’re employed at larger companies and defense contractors where the overwhelming majority of revenue goes to pay all workers (of which they’re a small fraction), expenses such as leases, or profit for executives.

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

#376

Post by BiteCode_dev » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:11 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…

Oh yes, there are tons of giants creating software for health applications you never heard of, defense purposes you cannot hear about, logistic you would never consider (managing competitions, port services, private jet traffic, truck fleets...) and so on.

And those don't use $LATEST_TECH, $FANCY_FRAMEWORK or $EXOTIC_LANGUAGE.

They use $BORING_TECH, $OLD_LANGUAGE, $DEPRECATED_FRAMEWORK.

They are not in the cloud, don't update often, have to deal with legacy stacks, stacked on a stack of legacy stacks, and administrative burden from left to right.

Those are the ones that pay for an Oracle licence, and sync it to dozens of excel sheets from an FTP and a lone Access DB, where all auth is manage by a Tomcat service actually proxying to Active Directory and their custom CRM.

And they certainly don't have a team of 10x programmers. In fact, most are windows dev that never used the terminals and don't have admin rights on their machine.

I should know, I make half of my income going from company to company to train their team.

They are everywhere.

They make billions.

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

#377

Post by jamestimmins » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:13 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #44

dillonmckay wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are always looking for ideas! Can you give a few examples, please?

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?

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

#378

Post by ehsanu1 » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:15 PM UTC

sgillen wrote: post #209

runawaybottle wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you might be surprised, it’s possible some types of programming could be automated away. Honestly I would consider writing programs more straightforward to automate than a lot of systems that need to interact with the physics map world, or with people.

But programming is essentially about interacting with people more so than interacting with computers, even now. It's less so that the job will go away than that its nature will change, such that the proportion of time interacting with people goes up, and the time currently spent "coding" will instead be spent interacting with AI which writes the actual code. But this AI won't be smart enough for a while to talk to a normal human who doesn't know how to talk to it and translate requirements into the right form. Hence the need for the programmer. Programmers will make use of the automation to just become much more productive.

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

#379

Post by spitfire » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:44 PM UTC

pascalxus wrote: post #131

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.

>> "heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the place" This isn't the case from my experience. I've networked with and interviewed dozens of people. It's incredibly difficult to find worthwhile problems that can be automated and aren't already automated. And, even here in the bay area, people tend to react pretty negatively the moment you even mention "repetitive processes". No one likes automation: they associate it with…

Did you know there's software to tell you how to unspool fiberoptic cable when laying underwater lines?

It's one massive long integral math equation.

It rents (yes, rents) out for $20K a week.

There's also coffee logistics software. There's software for private club management(tennis, polo, etc), moving and storage, even software just for spa's.

There is so much opportunity out there, the trick is finding it, and finding a working sales method.

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

#380

Post by wdb » Wed, May 13, 2020, 7:29 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…

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