3 ms·

Software is poorly explained by economics so I question the validity of economic considerations in hiring or paying developers. The thing that makes software d

Software is poorly explained by economics so I question the validity of economic considerations in hiring or paying developers. The thing that makes software different is scale due to low reproduction costs. You can easily envision the costs of adding new labor, for example, in building a car and directly map those expenses to increased production quantity. In that case scale of labor to scale of product is not exactly 1 to 1, but it’s close. In software that 1 to 1 scaling does not exist. Perhaps the big difference is that few people working a car assembly line are engineers. Most of the labor is produced by manual labor and robots. In software the actual engineering is equally as rare but the distinction between engineering and button pressing (the manual labor) is absent. To really prove that point many developers adamantly fear and oppose producing any form of original code. If you are terrified at writing original solutions to a problem how could the work possibly be considered any form of engineering? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21883670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21883670

wongarsu 7y ago
A software engineer is more like a car designer (or more general the entire R&D of car manufacturers). The number of car designers is independent of the number of cars you are producing, but if you want to have more or higher quality models you have to hire more of them.
- austincheney 7y ago
  Research (R&D) suggests some amount of intentional documented knowledge expansion, not mere personal learning. Every job has personal learning including scrubbing toilets and digging ditches. A person mindlessly smashing buttons will eventually learn to smash them faster with fewer mistakes but that isn’t scientific progress increasing understanding of product use cases. There actually is real research that occurs, with white papers, to test opinions and that isn’t what most developers are doing.
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    In this context I understand R&D as Research and (product) Development. Sure, that includes actual scientific research (say material science for better break pads) but also the development of that research into actual products (making a new, attractive, profitable break assembly with that great new materials the scientists came up with), as well as mundane product development (let's make a new truck by making slight modifications to last years model). Programming can fall anywhere on that spectrum.
cryptonector 7y ago
Low reproduction costs seems like a 90s thing. If you are building proprietary, not-for-sale software, then low reproduction costs have nothing to do with excess value. Ditto if you're building cloud-y/online services. On the cost side, too, software comes with extremely high maintenance costs that are often not accounted for ahead of time. These are so high that there had better be enormous excess value in the production and use of software regardless of the relevance of reproduction costs. The real value of software lies in making the impossible possible. Automation -made possible in the extreme by software- is extremely valuable. Even beyond automation, there are things humans simply cannot do, and even things that mechanical devices alone simply cannot do as well as software-aided ones. It's hard to put a price on making impossible things possible.
- austincheney 7y ago
  Software isn't magic. It is either a product or a service the value of which is either a typical business question of marketplace penetration or internal expense reduction. That's it, but that isn't what this thread is about.

wongarsu 7y ago

A software engineer is more like a car designer (or more general the entire R&D of car manufacturers). The number of car designers is independent of the number of cars you are producing, but if you want to have more or higher quality models you have to hire more of them.

austincheney 7y ago
Research (R&D) suggests some amount of intentional documented knowledge expansion, not mere personal learning. Every job has personal learning including scrubbing toilets and digging ditches. A person mindlessly smashing buttons will eventually learn to smash them faster with fewer mistakes but that isn’t scientific progress increasing understanding of product use cases. There actually is real research that occurs, with white papers, to test opinions and that isn’t what most developers are doing.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  In this context I understand R&D as Research and (product) Development. Sure, that includes actual scientific research (say material science for better break pads) but also the development of that research into actual products (making a new, attractive, profitable break assembly with that great new materials the scientists came up with), as well as mundane product development (let's make a new truck by making slight modifications to last years model). Programming can fall anywhere on that spectrum.

cryptonector 7y ago

Low reproduction costs seems like a 90s thing. If you are building proprietary, not-for-sale software, then low reproduction costs have nothing to do with excess value. Ditto if you're building cloud-y/online services. On the cost side, too, software comes with extremely high maintenance costs that are often not accounted for ahead of time. These are so high that there had better be enormous excess value in the production and use of software regardless of the relevance of reproduction costs. The real value of software lies in making the impossible possible. Automation -made possible in the extreme by software- is extremely valuable. Even beyond automation, there are things humans simply cannot do, and even things that mechanical devices alone simply cannot do as well as software-aided ones. It's hard to put a price on making impossible things possible.

austincheney 7y ago
Software isn't magic. It is either a product or a service the value of which is either a typical business question of marketplace penetration or internal expense reduction. That's it, but that isn't what this thread is about.