25 ms·

Outgrowing Software

204 points by nreece 6y ago

grey-area 6y ago
Software is eating the world meant software will permeate and govern everything, every thing and every industry will be programmable, the world will be full of objects which are linked at a distance and change behaviour regularly, perhaps even with intents of their own. The combination of ML and robotics will spread software even farther into our physical world. The author compares software to consultants, disruptive but not producing meaningful change, I don't agree with this - industries are being changed forever or replaced, but the transformation isn’t done yet. The old intermediaries who used to decide what we consume are not dead yet but I think that power will be diffused across society as the cost of production falls and new mediums emerge. Retail - we’re only partway through a transformation but big retailers simply have no reason to exist in a world where you can have a package delivered same day to your door from a warehouse. TV - this will be replaced by other screens which encourage participation (live chat etc), and self-production (youtube), that’s not yet complete. Publishing - the entire knowledge of humanity is available online for the first time, most of it free, and people can publish their thoughts at zero cost. This is a remarkable revolution with profound impacts still reverberating. Gatekeepers like academic publishers are increasingly untenable and out of touch but are not gone yet. Music - democratised as the means of production are cheaper but the incumbents are not dead yet, however their position is becoming untenable. IMO we’re not even halfway through this revolution which is comparable in scope and time to the industrial revolution.
- benedictevans 6y ago
  Thanks for reading. However, that’s not what Marc meant by ‘software eating the world’ and it’s not how I described consultants.
  - grey-area 6y ago
    Thanks for the article, it was an interesting read. Genuinely interested, what do you think he meant? What do you feel the phrase means today? I read it as software will transform and replace many industries and physical things but will go back and find that essay again now - perhaps it's the bit about software permeating the physical world you object to? It was a really interesting phrase that I think resonated with a lot of people, so perhaps I read into it lots that wasn’t there. Re consultants, I was referring to this bit: There’s an old joke that consultants are like seagulls - they fly in, make lots of noise, mess everything up and then fly out. That’s pretty much what tech has done to media industries... It seemed to me your thesis was that software is done transforming these industries and the only interesting problems are industry specific and not related to software? I think there is still a lot of change left to go.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  >> but I think that power will be diffused across society as the cost of production falls I feel like this is the kind of optimistic sentiment, expressed over the years, that this essay is countering. Empirically, we've seen the opposite. Yes, "software ate the world." But no, it hasn't diffused anything. Once upon a time, it was expensive to press records or print books. Someone had to bankroll it, and so record labels and book publishers became. What actually happened when music and print digitized? Did they go to a flat, federated, diffused or disintermediated structure. No. They got more centralized. Unaffiliated musicians and TV/film makers work for the youtube or spotify. They have no control or influence over those companies, and have no power. In fact, they have less power than before because they, unlike the platforms, are decentralised. >> Music - democratised as the means of production are cheaper but the incumbents are not dead yet, however their position is becoming untenable. Untenable in theory. Sure, there is no need for someone to bankroll record pressing or book printing anymore. Hello zero marginal cost abundance. Yet, labels and publishers still exist. The industry structure is more centralised and more intermediated. Above labels/publishers are amazon, netflix, spotify, apple or google.... the new top of the pyramid. OOH, we can believe our own 2004 speculative reasoning about digital economics... and what is or isn't tenable. OTOH, we can look at reality in 2021 and accept the prevailing trends. Youtube, spotify, itunes, amazon, netflix and future monopolies are what abundance looks like, not Wikimedia, Linux or the www. We were wrong. Abundance has not impacted economic structures the way we expected. We have what we had before, but now with a tech monopoly at the top.
  - grey-area 6y ago
    I disagree that music and publishing have become more centralised. I have seen the death of the book publishing industry first hand - from the outside it might appear relatively unscathed, from the inside it has been hollowed out and is untenable. Publishers are clinging on but increasingly irrelevant and their margins are non-existent, which pushes their quality down, which undermines their business model further. They will survive another generation though on nostalgia and with steadily declining sales. They simply don’t have a viable business model any more. Sure we’re not living in the utopian future some imagined but that does not mean the transformation was not profound and ongoing. The transformation is far from over in those that were vulnerable to the internet and many industries have only just started being consumed.
- TehMrSkinner 6y ago
  Typically the encouraged participation of Twitch and YouTube is a mechanism to strengthen para-social relationships people make with "content creators" which I don't think is a good thing, if more and more people aren't making friends and building communities around them in favour of their "friends" and "communities" online then they're going to continue being at the mercy of the established order (whether that be Governments or Corporations) as there's no real unity in an online collective and there's no meaningful action a disparate group of people can do to effect change in a single place. On your publishing point it seems to me we're just abandoning quality control and rigour under the guise of begrudging gatekeeping (sometimes the gate does need to guarded) and whilst I agree that the subjectivity of art means more people being able to make and share music is probably a good thing (you can't definitively say there's "bad music") the same can't be said for information. Perhaps I'm too cynical but a large aspect of the past 20 years in software proliferation I don't like is the idea that we should just build things consequences be damned (Mark Zuckerburg especially has this belief) as we're never then taking the time to properly reflect on if there's a way to prevent harm up front or if the harm produced can't be mitigated maybe we shouldn't build these things in the first place. A rhetorical but interesting question is how many relationships do we think were ruined by Facebook? How much dysmorphia and self-loathing caused by Instagram?* How much hate spread by YouTube and Twitter? *(These two I find particularly interesting as we weren't even part way through uncovering the ill effects of unrealistic beauty standards set by Hollywood and the advertising industry over the last 50 years before along came these websites/apps whose solution was to allow you to airbrush and manipulate your own life and set your own unrealistic standards. There's now a generation and more to come who have just grown up with this being the way the world is).
  - grey-area 6y ago
    There are certainly a lot of bad aspects to the popularity contest which is the current internet. Sorry if I sounded too panglossian about recent changes, but I think people overlook just how profoundly our lives have been and are being transformed.
- gpanders 6y ago
  One downside to lowering the barrier of entry in all of these areas is the lack of any kind of quality control or content curation. Sure, anyone can publish their thoughts online for free, which I agree is a good thing for openness and freedom, but not everyone is equally qualified or competent. It becomes increasingly difficult to sift through the mountains of sub-standard garbage to find things worth consuming (NB I dislike the word “consuming” in this context, but I don’t know of a better catch-all term). Now sure, the old gatekeepers weren’t perfect at this either and they published a lot of garbage too. But I think this is something that needs to be discussed as content creation becomes increasingly democratized.
  - grey-area 6y ago
    Completely agree as popularity != quality and curation without cornering the market does have a lot of value. When I said gatekeepers I was thinking of academic publishers vs sci hub for example, or non-fiction publishers who operate on selling big names rather than quality.
skrebbel 6y ago
Sounds to me like Ben agrees that we're now in the Deployment Age (http://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html http://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html). I wonder if he also thinks that the VC model is a less good fit here.
wrnr 6y ago
It's also getting easier to make software and harder to make physical goods. Still software is probably the place to get started on a problem. I wanted to make something out of carbon fiber but I think I write my own cad software that can simulate braided structures before I'll buy an autoclave and scale a production line.
michael-ax 6y ago
Software ate the world and "the important questions are somewhere else." what do you think those are, and were they not always?
beforeolives 6y ago
This was interesting but it reads like it's only an introduction. What does the title mean? How are we outgrowing software if every company is a software company? Where are the important questions if not in software?
jeremydeanlakey 6y ago
> tech will change everything, but once the dust has settled the questions that matter will mostly be retail questions, not tech questions I'm not disagreeing but how will we know the dust has settled? I might have thought the dust had settled with music when you could download mp3s. But now streaming services are the thing.
Joeri 6y ago
We always seem to look at tech as if it is a thing unto itself, instead of a catalyst and enabler. Every industry is transformed by technology, but it remains fundamentally about the same thing. There was still a transportation industry after the move from horses to cars, and there is still a music industry after the move from physical media to digital downloads. If you don't understand the industry you are in, it doesn't matter how good your technology is. That doesn't mean things need to be done in the same way. What is transformative about software eating the world is the ability to bring distribution costs to zero, enabling radically different models. Only a deep understanding of an industry allows for a successful technology transition. For example, for me what is interesting about autonomous vehicles is not the convenience, but the transportation models enabled by a radically lower cost per travelled kilometer. Those who make the software for the autonomous vehicles will surely succeed, but so will those who understand what transportation models become possible using that software. I'm not sure whether being a car maker is an advantage or disadvantage, it depends on how well the car maker understands the transportation industry. For this reason I'm also not clear whether Tesla is relevant to the future of autonomous vehicles. It seems unlikely we're going to drive around in similar ways as today, just with a computer at the wheel. Tesla seems to be working towards improving today's model of car ownership and usage by making nicer cars. That's an old world model. Whatever the future of personal transportation is, it is not that.
- sudhirj 6y ago
  This is why I think SpaceX and Starlink are bigger businesses than Tesla. I already have an electric car, and it’s made by Hyundai, and they’ve been better at making cars since Elon was is diapers. Tesla is a catalyst, not the final state of the system. Those who can charge a toll on the network, though, are in a more interesting position. It’s not clear that anyone other than SpaceX is going to be able to build rockets cheap enough to maintain an Internet constellation any time soon. It’s certainly likely that others will try, but it’s possible that SpaceX will have the final word on cheap space flight, at least for a generation. To the point of the article, the real beneficiaries will be those who understand the consequences of humanity now having the option to spread out at low density, and due to autonomous driving and global connectivity, not seeing a drop in the quality of physical and intellectual life.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
I am going to bang on about this again, but imo software is a new form of literacy. Literacy of employees and customers transform(s/ed) all industries but we don't talk about the literacy department or literacy investments in corporations. (It's what annoys me about low-code solutions - it's like trying to write your novel by linking pre-drawn cartoon squares together in innovative ways.) You cannot compensate for lack of literacy in a company or society. Same for software. In short some companies and some societies will be software literate and have time to focus on the next problems as ben talks about here - while others are stuck in the transition period. But they must go through the transition period - having good answers to "publisher questions" won't help if you don't have good answers to API questions Software skills will remain a wage distinction for some time
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > software is a new form of literacy Do you mean basic skills in using a desktop computer, or do you mean software engineering skills? > we don't talk about the literacy department Software development is a skilled craft, and will remain so.
  - nickthemagicman 6y ago
    Reading itself used to be considered a skilled craft. Only 4% of people knew how to read during the middle ages. Mostly clergy and civil servants. The grandparent poster is right imo. If programming becomes just another thing everyone knows, and takes a software class every year like they take an English class, the world will be way better off.
    - colinb 6y ago
      Interesting idea. Will everyone spend the next twenty years complaining about how much they hated Mrs Jones the programming teacher and how Stroustrup ruined programming for them? Put it another way. The reason we interview people the way that we do, is because it isn't realistic (unfortunately) to expect that a CS grad can fizz-buzz, or delete from a linked list, or whatever. Anyone who has spent a little time interviewing can confirm this. Why should we expect that secondary education would do a better job?
amelius 6y ago
Software ate the world. And now Apple is eating software.
derriz 6y ago
The story displays a lack of historical perspective which I find common among technologists particularly those focussing on IT. The entire article seems to be based on the following premise: "In the past, IBM, Oracle or Microsoft sold technology to other companies, as a tool - they sold computers and software to GE, P&G and Citibank. Now there’s a generation of companies that both create software and use it themselves to enter another industry, and often to change it." This claim of an unprecedented economic change currently occurring seems obviously indefensible to me or at the very least historically ignorant? New companies exploiting (rather than selling) new technology (not just software) to displace incumbents is the oldest story in the world. And IBM, Microsoft and Oracle still sell technology as far as I can see.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cushychicken 6y ago
Reminds me of Joe from Halt and Catch Fire observing: "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing."
- datavirtue 6y ago
  A variation of "the network is the computer" perhaps.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
This piece has an odd conception of technology as a thing that transforms an industry once and then screeches to a halt. Technology is continuing to transform each industry it mentioned. Retail is rapidly becoming automated to a degree that would have looked like science fiction a decade ago, Tesla's battery technology continues to improve, video games continue to eclipse the movie industry. Speaking of the movie industry, it's very likely that if that day ever does come when Tom Cruise actually looks his age, the on-film Tom Cruise will not. Young actors of future generations will face competition from AI-generated likenesses of the stars of the past generation. Tech isn't close to done with any industry.
- ric2b 6y ago
  > Speaking of the movie industry, it's very likely that if that day ever does come when Tom Cruise actually looks his age, the on-film Tom Cruise will not. Young actors of future generations will face competition from AI-generated likenesses of the stars of the past generation. I don't think people are drawn to star actors simply because they like their face. It's more about the kind of roles they choose and how enjoyable they are to watch based on their talent. Unless the AI generated versions work the same way, showing up only in very few movies of a certain type/quality, I think people will get over them very quickly.
krishan711 6y ago
Wheenver reading articles like this i love to replace words like software with electricity or something similar. All these industries are and will continue to be disrupted by whatever the latest innovation is. It's just that software is the latest big one to change things so dramatically. People say similar things about crypto and finance or ai and writing. It seems silly to think this has ever not been the case and will ever not be the case.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
didibus 6y ago
> More fundamentally, though, for both music and books, most of the arguments and questions are music industry questions and book industry questions, not tech or software questions I agree with this so much, but in practice people actually don't realize this enough. When I work with business teams, they have a hard time distinguishing business rules from tech problems. So they'll say something like... Oh the payouts aren't deposited in time, we need to detect in advance that a payout is required and start the deposit process earlier. And then they'll say, that's a tech problem for the tech team to solve. Except not really, yes it takes a software engineer to program a computer to enact these rules and this process, if you've chosen to have the process managed by a computer. That said, all the difficulties are in defining the business rules. When exactly should you start the depositing process? Based on what will you define when it has to start, what if it's started and the customer removes their bank details, or what if etc. This all becomes hard business problems for the business to solve. So what happens in practice is, business domain experts overtime start to abstract more and more things to the computer, leaving the software to actually answer for these business problems and define the rules for them. In turn it is often to the developer to figure out the solution to the business problem and a strategy to solve it, and then implement it in the computer. Those things often end up happening together. That's why I think in effect software companies slowly move to owning the business itself. And this is a part of software is eating the world. As computers take over control, enforcement and execution of more and more business processes, the management and administration authority is slowly reversed, software becomes at the root, and software engineers at the helm. It becomes increasingly difficult for business people without that software background to realize that most things are not a software problem, but a business problem which they could be focusing on themselves, but are delegating more and more over to software companies and software engineers. It's pretty common to ask a business domain expert about how should this be handled, and for them to ask back, well how does the computer currently handles it?

204 points by nreece 6y ago

Software is eating the world meant software will permeate and govern everything, every thing and every industry will be programmable, the world will be full of objects which are linked at a distance and change behaviour regularly, perhaps even with intents of their own. The combination of ML and robotics will spread software even farther into our physical world. The author compares software to consultants, disruptive but not producing meaningful change, I don't agree with this - industries are being changed forever or replaced, but the transformation isn’t done yet. The old intermediaries who used to decide what we consume are not dead yet but I think that power will be diffused across society as the cost of production falls and new mediums emerge. Retail - we’re only partway through a transformation but big retailers simply have no reason to exist in a world where you can have a package delivered same day to your door from a warehouse. TV - this will be replaced by other screens which encourage participation (live chat etc), and self-production (youtube), that’s not yet complete. Publishing - the entire knowledge of humanity is available online for the first time, most of it free, and people can publish their thoughts at zero cost. This is a remarkable revolution with profound impacts still reverberating. Gatekeepers like academic publishers are increasingly untenable and out of touch but are not gone yet. Music - democratised as the means of production are cheaper but the incumbents are not dead yet, however their position is becoming untenable. IMO we’re not even halfway through this revolution which is comparable in scope and time to the industrial revolution.

benedictevans 6y ago
Thanks for reading. However, that’s not what Marc meant by ‘software eating the world’ and it’s not how I described consultants.
- grey-area 6y ago
  Thanks for the article, it was an interesting read. Genuinely interested, what do you think he meant? What do you feel the phrase means today? I read it as software will transform and replace many industries and physical things but will go back and find that essay again now - perhaps it's the bit about software permeating the physical world you object to? It was a really interesting phrase that I think resonated with a lot of people, so perhaps I read into it lots that wasn’t there. Re consultants, I was referring to this bit: There’s an old joke that consultants are like seagulls - they fly in, make lots of noise, mess everything up and then fly out. That’s pretty much what tech has done to media industries... It seemed to me your thesis was that software is done transforming these industries and the only interesting problems are industry specific and not related to software? I think there is still a lot of change left to go.
dalbasal 6y ago
>> but I think that power will be diffused across society as the cost of production falls I feel like this is the kind of optimistic sentiment, expressed over the years, that this essay is countering. Empirically, we've seen the opposite. Yes, "software ate the world." But no, it hasn't diffused anything. Once upon a time, it was expensive to press records or print books. Someone had to bankroll it, and so record labels and book publishers became. What actually happened when music and print digitized? Did they go to a flat, federated, diffused or disintermediated structure. No. They got more centralized. Unaffiliated musicians and TV/film makers work for the youtube or spotify. They have no control or influence over those companies, and have no power. In fact, they have less power than before because they, unlike the platforms, are decentralised. >> Music - democratised as the means of production are cheaper but the incumbents are not dead yet, however their position is becoming untenable. Untenable in theory. Sure, there is no need for someone to bankroll record pressing or book printing anymore. Hello zero marginal cost abundance. Yet, labels and publishers still exist. The industry structure is more centralised and more intermediated. Above labels/publishers are amazon, netflix, spotify, apple or google.... the new top of the pyramid. OOH, we can believe our own 2004 speculative reasoning about digital economics... and what is or isn't tenable. OTOH, we can look at reality in 2021 and accept the prevailing trends. Youtube, spotify, itunes, amazon, netflix and future monopolies are what abundance looks like, not Wikimedia, Linux or the www. We were wrong. Abundance has not impacted economic structures the way we expected. We have what we had before, but now with a tech monopoly at the top.
- grey-area 6y ago
  I disagree that music and publishing have become more centralised. I have seen the death of the book publishing industry first hand - from the outside it might appear relatively unscathed, from the inside it has been hollowed out and is untenable. Publishers are clinging on but increasingly irrelevant and their margins are non-existent, which pushes their quality down, which undermines their business model further. They will survive another generation though on nostalgia and with steadily declining sales. They simply don’t have a viable business model any more. Sure we’re not living in the utopian future some imagined but that does not mean the transformation was not profound and ongoing. The transformation is far from over in those that were vulnerable to the internet and many industries have only just started being consumed.
TehMrSkinner 6y ago
Typically the encouraged participation of Twitch and YouTube is a mechanism to strengthen para-social relationships people make with "content creators" which I don't think is a good thing, if more and more people aren't making friends and building communities around them in favour of their "friends" and "communities" online then they're going to continue being at the mercy of the established order (whether that be Governments or Corporations) as there's no real unity in an online collective and there's no meaningful action a disparate group of people can do to effect change in a single place. On your publishing point it seems to me we're just abandoning quality control and rigour under the guise of begrudging gatekeeping (sometimes the gate does need to guarded) and whilst I agree that the subjectivity of art means more people being able to make and share music is probably a good thing (you can't definitively say there's "bad music") the same can't be said for information. Perhaps I'm too cynical but a large aspect of the past 20 years in software proliferation I don't like is the idea that we should just build things consequences be damned (Mark Zuckerburg especially has this belief) as we're never then taking the time to properly reflect on if there's a way to prevent harm up front or if the harm produced can't be mitigated maybe we shouldn't build these things in the first place. A rhetorical but interesting question is how many relationships do we think were ruined by Facebook? How much dysmorphia and self-loathing caused by Instagram?* How much hate spread by YouTube and Twitter? *(These two I find particularly interesting as we weren't even part way through uncovering the ill effects of unrealistic beauty standards set by Hollywood and the advertising industry over the last 50 years before along came these websites/apps whose solution was to allow you to airbrush and manipulate your own life and set your own unrealistic standards. There's now a generation and more to come who have just grown up with this being the way the world is).
- grey-area 6y ago
  There are certainly a lot of bad aspects to the popularity contest which is the current internet. Sorry if I sounded too panglossian about recent changes, but I think people overlook just how profoundly our lives have been and are being transformed.
gpanders 6y ago
One downside to lowering the barrier of entry in all of these areas is the lack of any kind of quality control or content curation. Sure, anyone can publish their thoughts online for free, which I agree is a good thing for openness and freedom, but not everyone is equally qualified or competent. It becomes increasingly difficult to sift through the mountains of sub-standard garbage to find things worth consuming (NB I dislike the word “consuming” in this context, but I don’t know of a better catch-all term). Now sure, the old gatekeepers weren’t perfect at this either and they published a lot of garbage too. But I think this is something that needs to be discussed as content creation becomes increasingly democratized.
- grey-area 6y ago
  Completely agree as popularity != quality and curation without cornering the market does have a lot of value. When I said gatekeepers I was thinking of academic publishers vs sci hub for example, or non-fiction publishers who operate on selling big names rather than quality.

skrebbel 6y ago

Sounds to me like Ben agrees that we're now in the Deployment Age (http://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html http://reactionwheel.net/2015/10/the-deployment-age.html). I wonder if he also thinks that the VC model is a less good fit here.

wrnr 6y ago

It's also getting easier to make software and harder to make physical goods. Still software is probably the place to get started on a problem. I wanted to make something out of carbon fiber but I think I write my own cad software that can simulate braided structures before I'll buy an autoclave and scale a production line.

michael-ax 6y ago

Software ate the world and "the important questions are somewhere else." what do you think those are, and were they not always?

beforeolives 6y ago

This was interesting but it reads like it's only an introduction. What does the title mean? How are we outgrowing software if every company is a software company? Where are the important questions if not in software?

jeremydeanlakey 6y ago

> tech will change everything, but once the dust has settled the questions that matter will mostly be retail questions, not tech questions I'm not disagreeing but how will we know the dust has settled? I might have thought the dust had settled with music when you could download mp3s. But now streaming services are the thing.

Joeri 6y ago

We always seem to look at tech as if it is a thing unto itself, instead of a catalyst and enabler. Every industry is transformed by technology, but it remains fundamentally about the same thing. There was still a transportation industry after the move from horses to cars, and there is still a music industry after the move from physical media to digital downloads. If you don't understand the industry you are in, it doesn't matter how good your technology is. That doesn't mean things need to be done in the same way. What is transformative about software eating the world is the ability to bring distribution costs to zero, enabling radically different models. Only a deep understanding of an industry allows for a successful technology transition. For example, for me what is interesting about autonomous vehicles is not the convenience, but the transportation models enabled by a radically lower cost per travelled kilometer. Those who make the software for the autonomous vehicles will surely succeed, but so will those who understand what transportation models become possible using that software. I'm not sure whether being a car maker is an advantage or disadvantage, it depends on how well the car maker understands the transportation industry. For this reason I'm also not clear whether Tesla is relevant to the future of autonomous vehicles. It seems unlikely we're going to drive around in similar ways as today, just with a computer at the wheel. Tesla seems to be working towards improving today's model of car ownership and usage by making nicer cars. That's an old world model. Whatever the future of personal transportation is, it is not that.

sudhirj 6y ago
This is why I think SpaceX and Starlink are bigger businesses than Tesla. I already have an electric car, and it’s made by Hyundai, and they’ve been better at making cars since Elon was is diapers. Tesla is a catalyst, not the final state of the system. Those who can charge a toll on the network, though, are in a more interesting position. It’s not clear that anyone other than SpaceX is going to be able to build rockets cheap enough to maintain an Internet constellation any time soon. It’s certainly likely that others will try, but it’s possible that SpaceX will have the final word on cheap space flight, at least for a generation. To the point of the article, the real beneficiaries will be those who understand the consequences of humanity now having the option to spread out at low density, and due to autonomous driving and global connectivity, not seeing a drop in the quality of physical and intellectual life.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

I am going to bang on about this again, but imo software is a new form of literacy. Literacy of employees and customers transform(s/ed) all industries but we don't talk about the literacy department or literacy investments in corporations. (It's what annoys me about low-code solutions - it's like trying to write your novel by linking pre-drawn cartoon squares together in innovative ways.) You cannot compensate for lack of literacy in a company or society. Same for software. In short some companies and some societies will be software literate and have time to focus on the next problems as ben talks about here - while others are stuck in the transition period. But they must go through the transition period - having good answers to "publisher questions" won't help if you don't have good answers to API questions Software skills will remain a wage distinction for some time

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> software is a new form of literacy Do you mean basic skills in using a desktop computer, or do you mean software engineering skills? > we don't talk about the literacy department Software development is a skilled craft, and will remain so.
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  Reading itself used to be considered a skilled craft. Only 4% of people knew how to read during the middle ages. Mostly clergy and civil servants. The grandparent poster is right imo. If programming becomes just another thing everyone knows, and takes a software class every year like they take an English class, the world will be way better off.
  - colinb 6y ago
    Interesting idea. Will everyone spend the next twenty years complaining about how much they hated Mrs Jones the programming teacher and how Stroustrup ruined programming for them? Put it another way. The reason we interview people the way that we do, is because it isn't realistic (unfortunately) to expect that a CS grad can fizz-buzz, or delete from a linked list, or whatever. Anyone who has spent a little time interviewing can confirm this. Why should we expect that secondary education would do a better job?

amelius 6y ago

Software ate the world. And now Apple is eating software.

derriz 6y ago

The story displays a lack of historical perspective which I find common among technologists particularly those focussing on IT. The entire article seems to be based on the following premise: "In the past, IBM, Oracle or Microsoft sold technology to other companies, as a tool - they sold computers and software to GE, P&G and Citibank. Now there’s a generation of companies that both create software and use it themselves to enter another industry, and often to change it." This claim of an unprecedented economic change currently occurring seems obviously indefensible to me or at the very least historically ignorant? New companies exploiting (rather than selling) new technology (not just software) to displace incumbents is the oldest story in the world. And IBM, Microsoft and Oracle still sell technology as far as I can see.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cushychicken 6y ago

Reminds me of Joe from Halt and Catch Fire observing: "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing."

datavirtue 6y ago
A variation of "the network is the computer" perhaps.

AlchemistCamp 6y ago

This piece has an odd conception of technology as a thing that transforms an industry once and then screeches to a halt. Technology is continuing to transform each industry it mentioned. Retail is rapidly becoming automated to a degree that would have looked like science fiction a decade ago, Tesla's battery technology continues to improve, video games continue to eclipse the movie industry. Speaking of the movie industry, it's very likely that if that day ever does come when Tom Cruise actually looks his age, the on-film Tom Cruise will not. Young actors of future generations will face competition from AI-generated likenesses of the stars of the past generation. Tech isn't close to done with any industry.

ric2b 6y ago
> Speaking of the movie industry, it's very likely that if that day ever does come when Tom Cruise actually looks his age, the on-film Tom Cruise will not. Young actors of future generations will face competition from AI-generated likenesses of the stars of the past generation. I don't think people are drawn to star actors simply because they like their face. It's more about the kind of roles they choose and how enjoyable they are to watch based on their talent. Unless the AI generated versions work the same way, showing up only in very few movies of a certain type/quality, I think people will get over them very quickly.

krishan711 6y ago

Wheenver reading articles like this i love to replace words like software with electricity or something similar. All these industries are and will continue to be disrupted by whatever the latest innovation is. It's just that software is the latest big one to change things so dramatically. People say similar things about crypto and finance or ai and writing. It seems silly to think this has ever not been the case and will ever not be the case.

deleted 6y ago

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didibus 6y ago

> More fundamentally, though, for both music and books, most of the arguments and questions are music industry questions and book industry questions, not tech or software questions I agree with this so much, but in practice people actually don't realize this enough. When I work with business teams, they have a hard time distinguishing business rules from tech problems. So they'll say something like... Oh the payouts aren't deposited in time, we need to detect in advance that a payout is required and start the deposit process earlier. And then they'll say, that's a tech problem for the tech team to solve. Except not really, yes it takes a software engineer to program a computer to enact these rules and this process, if you've chosen to have the process managed by a computer. That said, all the difficulties are in defining the business rules. When exactly should you start the depositing process? Based on what will you define when it has to start, what if it's started and the customer removes their bank details, or what if etc. This all becomes hard business problems for the business to solve. So what happens in practice is, business domain experts overtime start to abstract more and more things to the computer, leaving the software to actually answer for these business problems and define the rules for them. In turn it is often to the developer to figure out the solution to the business problem and a strategy to solve it, and then implement it in the computer. Those things often end up happening together. That's why I think in effect software companies slowly move to owning the business itself. And this is a part of software is eating the world. As computers take over control, enforcement and execution of more and more business processes, the management and administration authority is slowly reversed, software becomes at the root, and software engineers at the helm. It becomes increasingly difficult for business people without that software background to realize that most things are not a software problem, but a business problem which they could be focusing on themselves, but are delegating more and more over to software companies and software engineers. It's pretty common to ask a business domain expert about how should this be handled, and for them to ask back, well how does the computer currently handles it?