5 ms·

There's great power in scratching your own itch and building the tools and software you want for the real problem you have right now. But on the flip side, a l

There's great power in scratching your own itch and building the tools and software you want for the real problem you have right now. But on the flip side, a lot of the software regular people use for their jobs is awful. As software engineers we've built lovely tools for ourselves (development environments, version control, etc). We've scratched our own itch. But we collectively don't feel a lot of empathy for folks in other industries. So they end up with bad, missing or massively overpriced software as a result. The answer is to go outside, and make friends with people who aren't software engineers. Pick up a hobby or a craft. The best software is always made out of necessity.

hogFeast 5y ago
I think the problem with the author's POV is posing the problem as a choice between making for yourself or making for no-one (by trying to please other people). Trying to please other people is how a market economy functions. You do not produce the things that you would ideally want to produce but the things that other people need. I think the issues you raise are totally correct, and don't just apply to entrepreneurs. Most developers will, if given the choice, build complexity into products. They will develop things that are fun to develop, not fun to use. And when people want to build a new business, they will usually try to build things that are fun to build...not many people want to build things for water treatment plants or waste disposal operators, that isn't fun or cool. So I think there is a way in the middle. You should be guided by your own want (but that want should be the product, not building the product) but business is about serving customers. The puzzle over market fit is strange to me...if you aren't building something that other people need, that isn't a business. You have to respond to the market, other people as much as be guided by your own beliefs. Side-note: you see this in almost every walk of life. Craftsmen prefer old techniques that are fun but result in lower quality. You see it in medicine. Investing is an interesting one too...you only get paid if the world comes round to your view but some people will actively shut out the opinions of other people...that ends badly 100% of the time because you are shutting out the only information that will stop you from making a bad decision (eventually).
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  The problem with other people is that a) You really don't know what they want b) They want different things. But if you build for yourself you a) know what you want b) There is only one you
leesec 5y ago
>As software engineers we've built lovely tools for ourselves (development environments, VERSION CONTROL, etc). Hmm, can't say I agree with your second point. The industry standard version control is notoriously messy and hard to work with.
- animal_spirits 5y ago
  AFAIK git was initially built to be a source control engine for other tools to build on top of, but most people have just used the underlying engine since it was easier. But I've really started to grok git after using a program called lazygit [0]. Basically a terminal UI on top of git where I don't have to remember the messy language of the engine, I just need to remember a couple of keystrokes. [0] https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit
  - thewakalix 5y ago
    Reminds me of how Lisp’s syntax was meant to be an intermediate format, but everyone found it intuitive enough that they didn’t bother writing the planned non-sexpr language.
    - RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
      perhaps you have heard of BANCStar: https://esolangs.org/wiki/BANCStar https://esolangs.org/wiki/BANCStar
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    There are loads of UI layers over git. But largely the git cli is just better and more logical. Other than some minor weirdness, its a pretty good tool. The GUIs never expose the full power or standard error messages that the CLI will. Had a case where gitlab was blocking a push because the master branch was protected. The git gui gave the wrong error message about why the push was rejected.
SilverRed 5y ago
>But we collectively don't feel a lot of empathy for folks in other industries. People work for free on things they enjoy and not what others want. This is no shocker. I don't have builders building me a house for free just for the fun of it. In general in the world, if you want someone to do something that you want and not what they want, you have to compensate them for this work. And this works fantastically for areas where people are willing to pay. The consumer hardware we have today is mind blowingly good and the software to go with it is outstanding.
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  They never said anything about working for free.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    If you are paying for developers than no "empathy" is needed. Shitty industry software is due to the business clinging on to legacy systems and refusing to invest in new ones. And often they are right, using the legacy software has better business outcomes than spending the money required to make something better. We see that when the investment is made, we get great software. The camera software we have is remarkable compared to what we had 10 years ago.
    - josephg 5y ago
      > If you are paying for developers than no "empathy" is needed. I don't agree. I think its impossible to make good software without deeply understanding the perspective and needs of your users. Money can be used to hire empathetic designers, but its hard to beat software designed and made and maintained by its users directly. I worked with a designer years ago who organized a series of user study sessions with our prospective clients. She insisted on each engineer on the team going to at least one of those sessions with her. I thought it was a bit silly - but I went to a couple of meetings and I was shocked. It was hugely eye opening for me - I learned so much. It made our product better, too. Down the track I added some small features to our product that nobody asked for, but which were easy to implement and which our clients loved. It wouldn't have occurred to me to add any of that stuff if I didn't first sit in those meetings and hear things from their perspective.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
strken 5y ago
There are three separate groups involved in modern software markets; the user, the author, and the middlemen who connect the two. I think the reason software for non-developers is awful is because the middlemen are incentivised to connect users to the most profitable software for the middleman, not the best for the user. For example, there's no easy way to search the app store or Google play for free software with no ads, in any sense of the word free, because free software without ads isn't profitable. All the top ranking app review sites are listicles for ad-supported or paid apps, because those apps have marketing budgets. It is easier to find a FOSS app's github repo and navigate to the play store from there than it is to find FOSS apps on the actual store. In general there's less profit to be made from showing someone high quality free products than low quality paid products who'll give you a cut of the take.
cookiengineer 5y ago
> So they end up with bad, missing or massively overpriced software as a result. Immediately, SAP NetWeaver comes to mind. The whole architecture, concept and experience is violating every possible UX guideline of any operating system - and has never been updated since the 80s. Every single person I've talked to hates SAP for various reasons. Nobody understands why there's no alternative, and nobody understands why SAP exists in the first place. And everybody hates that SAP created the optimum lock-in scenario; where they fictionally created the maximum amount of cost for companies trying to switch to another, more modern, system.
- josephg 5y ago
  This is a bit offtopic but, can anyone explain what SAP is and why its used? I've heard people mention SAP for well over a decade and I've never gotten a clear story on what it actually does for the companies which use it.
  - cookiengineer 5y ago
    SAP is a large-scale system for resource planning. It nails down to managing development/engineering/human resources in a waterfall-managed company, and usually the workforce have to maintain their own "digital stamping" like enter/leave the company and/or on what projects they've been working on, so the workers use SAP in order to do their own accounting. The advantage SAP has from an enterprise's point of view is "automated" accounting that theoretically can be integrated into third-party software, like the software that sends out bills via mail to customers. Usually SAP is too bloated for everyone, in Germany we would say "mit Kanonen auf Spatzen schiessen" because it's too much overhead for maintaining/licensing the system vs. just using a simpler alternative that likely even is open source and can be modified quickly to your needs. From a selling point of view, SAP is always sold as "it can do anything out of the box" without any development resources necessary. While that's far away from the actual truth, most CEOs believe that kind of stuff and just buy the service; which is contracted in a way that it has a minimum lifetime of years (usually 10 years+) until you're allowed to change to an alternative. Legal requirement to archive all bills 10 years does the rest, et voila, you have a working Dip nobody can exit out of.
kevmo314 5y ago
The hobby angle is so powerful. Software engineers are relatively rare so being able to automate and build for any hobby field is wildly lucrative. That's where I've found my projects' greatest success.
______- 5y ago
> There's great power in scratching your own itch Yes I build for myself foremost, and if other people get to use my tool, then that's a bonus. However this comes with the caveat of having to build in business logic from the get-go (Unless it's FLOSS in which case it's a free-for-all and I would be working for free).
huijzer 5y ago
The problem is often that the whole workflow of a user needs change to leverage things like version control and development environments. For example, when the whole company is doing everything in Microsoft Office, there is not much benefit in introducing git.
SZJX 5y ago
Yep. I don't feel the advice in this piece is very useful if you want to create an actual mature product. When you create for just yourself or "one specific person", surely you scratch some specific needs, but how do you ensure that your product won't be a market failure? I'm totally for creating tools to your own heart's content, but this sounds like bad advice when you actually create a for-profit product as a full-time job. A lot of parts of this article also ring really hollow and sound like the cliched "follow your own passion" talk without much substance, which is not that surprising I guess seeing that the author is a uni freshman. I think there is tremendous value in life in thinking about how to leverage your abilities to the maximum effect to serve and make an impact on the others, even if it might imply giving up part of what you thought you personally like to do the best. (Cal Newport's idea and his dislike towards the "follow your passion" slogan is somewhat similar to this.) A simple example would be trying to build something in your favorite but esoteric programming language which pretty much nobody else uses, instead of using a boring but mature technology with a lot of community support, which practically all big companies do. Will your pet product reach millions of people? Unlikely. Will you lose some of the "personality" that you tried to cling to, if you either join a big tech company, or grow your own company rapidly using battle-tested technologies? Probably. But in the end most wisdom seems to suggest that being able to serve the others (and by definition millions of others are bound to be "faceless") will be ultimately much more fulfilling and mature than attaching too much self-importance to your own peculiar quirks and beliefs that you just can't let go of.

hogFeast 5y ago

I think the problem with the author's POV is posing the problem as a choice between making for yourself or making for no-one (by trying to please other people). Trying to please other people is how a market economy functions. You do not produce the things that you would ideally want to produce but the things that other people need. I think the issues you raise are totally correct, and don't just apply to entrepreneurs. Most developers will, if given the choice, build complexity into products. They will develop things that are fun to develop, not fun to use. And when people want to build a new business, they will usually try to build things that are fun to build...not many people want to build things for water treatment plants or waste disposal operators, that isn't fun or cool. So I think there is a way in the middle. You should be guided by your own want (but that want should be the product, not building the product) but business is about serving customers. The puzzle over market fit is strange to me...if you aren't building something that other people need, that isn't a business. You have to respond to the market, other people as much as be guided by your own beliefs. Side-note: you see this in almost every walk of life. Craftsmen prefer old techniques that are fun but result in lower quality. You see it in medicine. Investing is an interesting one too...you only get paid if the world comes round to your view but some people will actively shut out the opinions of other people...that ends badly 100% of the time because you are shutting out the only information that will stop you from making a bad decision (eventually).

galaxyLogic 5y ago
The problem with other people is that a) You really don't know what they want b) They want different things. But if you build for yourself you a) know what you want b) There is only one you

leesec 5y ago

>As software engineers we've built lovely tools for ourselves (development environments, VERSION CONTROL, etc). Hmm, can't say I agree with your second point. The industry standard version control is notoriously messy and hard to work with.

animal_spirits 5y ago
AFAIK git was initially built to be a source control engine for other tools to build on top of, but most people have just used the underlying engine since it was easier. But I've really started to grok git after using a program called lazygit [0]. Basically a terminal UI on top of git where I don't have to remember the messy language of the engine, I just need to remember a couple of keystrokes. [0] https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit
- thewakalix 5y ago
  Reminds me of how Lisp’s syntax was meant to be an intermediate format, but everyone found it intuitive enough that they didn’t bother writing the planned non-sexpr language.
  - RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
    perhaps you have heard of BANCStar: https://esolangs.org/wiki/BANCStar https://esolangs.org/wiki/BANCStar
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- SilverRed 5y ago
  There are loads of UI layers over git. But largely the git cli is just better and more logical. Other than some minor weirdness, its a pretty good tool. The GUIs never expose the full power or standard error messages that the CLI will. Had a case where gitlab was blocking a push because the master branch was protected. The git gui gave the wrong error message about why the push was rejected.

SilverRed 5y ago

>But we collectively don't feel a lot of empathy for folks in other industries. People work for free on things they enjoy and not what others want. This is no shocker. I don't have builders building me a house for free just for the fun of it. In general in the world, if you want someone to do something that you want and not what they want, you have to compensate them for this work. And this works fantastically for areas where people are willing to pay. The consumer hardware we have today is mind blowingly good and the software to go with it is outstanding.

weird-eye-issue 5y ago
They never said anything about working for free.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  If you are paying for developers than no "empathy" is needed. Shitty industry software is due to the business clinging on to legacy systems and refusing to invest in new ones. And often they are right, using the legacy software has better business outcomes than spending the money required to make something better. We see that when the investment is made, we get great software. The camera software we have is remarkable compared to what we had 10 years ago.
  - josephg 5y ago
    > If you are paying for developers than no "empathy" is needed. I don't agree. I think its impossible to make good software without deeply understanding the perspective and needs of your users. Money can be used to hire empathetic designers, but its hard to beat software designed and made and maintained by its users directly. I worked with a designer years ago who organized a series of user study sessions with our prospective clients. She insisted on each engineer on the team going to at least one of those sessions with her. I thought it was a bit silly - but I went to a couple of meetings and I was shocked. It was hugely eye opening for me - I learned so much. It made our product better, too. Down the track I added some small features to our product that nobody asked for, but which were easy to implement and which our clients loved. It wouldn't have occurred to me to add any of that stuff if I didn't first sit in those meetings and hear things from their perspective.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

strken 5y ago

There are three separate groups involved in modern software markets; the user, the author, and the middlemen who connect the two. I think the reason software for non-developers is awful is because the middlemen are incentivised to connect users to the most profitable software for the middleman, not the best for the user. For example, there's no easy way to search the app store or Google play for free software with no ads, in any sense of the word free, because free software without ads isn't profitable. All the top ranking app review sites are listicles for ad-supported or paid apps, because those apps have marketing budgets. It is easier to find a FOSS app's github repo and navigate to the play store from there than it is to find FOSS apps on the actual store. In general there's less profit to be made from showing someone high quality free products than low quality paid products who'll give you a cut of the take.

cookiengineer 5y ago

> So they end up with bad, missing or massively overpriced software as a result. Immediately, SAP NetWeaver comes to mind. The whole architecture, concept and experience is violating every possible UX guideline of any operating system - and has never been updated since the 80s. Every single person I've talked to hates SAP for various reasons. Nobody understands why there's no alternative, and nobody understands why SAP exists in the first place. And everybody hates that SAP created the optimum lock-in scenario; where they fictionally created the maximum amount of cost for companies trying to switch to another, more modern, system.

josephg 5y ago
This is a bit offtopic but, can anyone explain what SAP is and why its used? I've heard people mention SAP for well over a decade and I've never gotten a clear story on what it actually does for the companies which use it.
- cookiengineer 5y ago
  SAP is a large-scale system for resource planning. It nails down to managing development/engineering/human resources in a waterfall-managed company, and usually the workforce have to maintain their own "digital stamping" like enter/leave the company and/or on what projects they've been working on, so the workers use SAP in order to do their own accounting. The advantage SAP has from an enterprise's point of view is "automated" accounting that theoretically can be integrated into third-party software, like the software that sends out bills via mail to customers. Usually SAP is too bloated for everyone, in Germany we would say "mit Kanonen auf Spatzen schiessen" because it's too much overhead for maintaining/licensing the system vs. just using a simpler alternative that likely even is open source and can be modified quickly to your needs. From a selling point of view, SAP is always sold as "it can do anything out of the box" without any development resources necessary. While that's far away from the actual truth, most CEOs believe that kind of stuff and just buy the service; which is contracted in a way that it has a minimum lifetime of years (usually 10 years+) until you're allowed to change to an alternative. Legal requirement to archive all bills 10 years does the rest, et voila, you have a working Dip nobody can exit out of.

kevmo314 5y ago

The hobby angle is so powerful. Software engineers are relatively rare so being able to automate and build for any hobby field is wildly lucrative. That's where I've found my projects' greatest success.

______- 5y ago

> There's great power in scratching your own itch Yes I build for myself foremost, and if other people get to use my tool, then that's a bonus. However this comes with the caveat of having to build in business logic from the get-go (Unless it's FLOSS in which case it's a free-for-all and I would be working for free).

huijzer 5y ago

The problem is often that the whole workflow of a user needs change to leverage things like version control and development environments. For example, when the whole company is doing everything in Microsoft Office, there is not much benefit in introducing git.

SZJX 5y ago

Yep. I don't feel the advice in this piece is very useful if you want to create an actual mature product. When you create for just yourself or "one specific person", surely you scratch some specific needs, but how do you ensure that your product won't be a market failure? I'm totally for creating tools to your own heart's content, but this sounds like bad advice when you actually create a for-profit product as a full-time job. A lot of parts of this article also ring really hollow and sound like the cliched "follow your own passion" talk without much substance, which is not that surprising I guess seeing that the author is a uni freshman. I think there is tremendous value in life in thinking about how to leverage your abilities to the maximum effect to serve and make an impact on the others, even if it might imply giving up part of what you thought you personally like to do the best. (Cal Newport's idea and his dislike towards the "follow your passion" slogan is somewhat similar to this.) A simple example would be trying to build something in your favorite but esoteric programming language which pretty much nobody else uses, instead of using a boring but mature technology with a lot of community support, which practically all big companies do. Will your pet product reach millions of people? Unlikely. Will you lose some of the "personality" that you tried to cling to, if you either join a big tech company, or grow your own company rapidly using battle-tested technologies? Probably. But in the end most wisdom seems to suggest that being able to serve the others (and by definition millions of others are bound to be "faceless") will be ultimately much more fulfilling and mature than attaching too much self-importance to your own peculiar quirks and beliefs that you just can't let go of.