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> Open source contributors give away a lot of value, since if everyone had to re-create their work … there would be 1,000,000 times the demand for software engi

> Open source contributors give away a lot of value, since if everyone had to re-create their work … there would be 1,000,000 times the demand for software engineers than there is today This is a misconception. Imagine everyone had to write everything in FORTRAN. Would there be more or less work for SWEs? There would be less because each one would be far less productive and the value you could get out of hiring one would be small. You’d never hire someone unless you can make more money off of their employment than you have to pay them. SWEs get paid a lot because they are able to generate a lot of marginal value. Without the tools that make us productive, we don’t have that value.

jbay808 5y ago
Exactly. The real reason for high SWE demand is that the world is absolutely littered with computers, and their value appreciates each time they're taught to do something new.
deleted 5y ago
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hyperman1 5y ago
Interesting question, because ICT has a tendency to do a progress reset every half decade. Look at things like cpan: Tons of interesting librarys in what is for today the wrong language. Java's maven ecosystem, once a center of open source, is quickly becoming an enterprise-only dead zone. There are plenty of smaller examples, like the tons of dos/qbasic code, the VB6 component ecosystem. javascript is one of the current hotspots, but even there entire sub ecosystems are slowly falling away. Each time we win by having better tools, but we lose by dropping all the optimization already done. And things like lisp or ada show there were better tools than the industry average available in the past, except their ecosystems didn't grow enough and/or died.
- theptip 5y ago
  My mental model for this process is that whenever a team chooses a new language with a less-complete stdlib (eg moving Perl -> early Python) it’s because there’s a net gain for the specific task at hand, even though you take a productivity hit in some areas. Then if enough developers use the new “better for task X,Y,Z” thing then there is incentive/resource to gradually grow the stdlib capabilities to cover all the old use cases. And in doing so, often some of the initial expressiveness/focus is lost, so there’s now a bit more room for a new focused competitor to come in and repeat the process. Some find this exhausting, or think that it represents “fad chasing” without creating any new value, but I think it’s just what progress/evolution looks like in a community-based system of knowledge like software languages. To your point about lisp or ada being better - using an evolutionary metaphor, it’s possible for fitter genotypes to lose to less-fit ones through random chance. But in these cases it’s hard to tell whether it’s not actually the case that these languages, while better for some users/use-cases, are actually lacking something that makes them suitable for broader usage. (For example - if a paradigm was incredibly productive, but requires you to have a maths PhD, then you’d expect to see some users claiming the tools are better, at the same time as those tools failing to get broader adoption. I’m not making a specific claim here about lisp, just painting some possible fact patterns that could explain the phenomenon.)
dv_dt 5y ago
Some portion of the value is the precision of thinking that the compute environment and the languages force upon sw engineers. There is gain for businesses in not fudging processes that should have some precise state or flow - independent of the software.
sanderjd 5y ago
Very well put. A common pushback I get when discussing ideas for software solutions is "wouldn't this put people out of work?" and I think the answer is often "yes, but it would employ more, more productively". I think the best evidence of this is that we constantly do it to ourselves with open source and other tools (like fairly cheap and easy to use SaaS tools), to great success. There are probably diminishing returns to this over time, but it doesn't seem to me that we've hit them yet.
marto1 5y ago
> Without the tools that make us productive, we don’t have that value. This combined with relative lack of government regulations. I'd hate to see the day when you'll have to complete 3 separate training programs/licenses just to be allowed to deploy code on the Web.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
I agree this is a misconception but not for the same reasons. What would happen is that all different companies would end up implementing the same functionalities over and over again. I know companies that don't rely on OSS for security reasons and that's exactly what happens. Maybe some companies would step up together and publish a shared There would be a tiny bit more of demands compared to nowadays, SWEs would find it harder to move companies - but I don't think SWEs productivity wouldn't be affected, once they finish onboarding and learning whatever the standard library in a specific company works like.

jbay808 5y ago

Exactly. The real reason for high SWE demand is that the world is absolutely littered with computers, and their value appreciates each time they're taught to do something new.

deleted 5y ago

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hyperman1 5y ago

Interesting question, because ICT has a tendency to do a progress reset every half decade. Look at things like cpan: Tons of interesting librarys in what is for today the wrong language. Java's maven ecosystem, once a center of open source, is quickly becoming an enterprise-only dead zone. There are plenty of smaller examples, like the tons of dos/qbasic code, the VB6 component ecosystem. javascript is one of the current hotspots, but even there entire sub ecosystems are slowly falling away. Each time we win by having better tools, but we lose by dropping all the optimization already done. And things like lisp or ada show there were better tools than the industry average available in the past, except their ecosystems didn't grow enough and/or died.

theptip 5y ago
My mental model for this process is that whenever a team chooses a new language with a less-complete stdlib (eg moving Perl -> early Python) it’s because there’s a net gain for the specific task at hand, even though you take a productivity hit in some areas. Then if enough developers use the new “better for task X,Y,Z” thing then there is incentive/resource to gradually grow the stdlib capabilities to cover all the old use cases. And in doing so, often some of the initial expressiveness/focus is lost, so there’s now a bit more room for a new focused competitor to come in and repeat the process. Some find this exhausting, or think that it represents “fad chasing” without creating any new value, but I think it’s just what progress/evolution looks like in a community-based system of knowledge like software languages. To your point about lisp or ada being better - using an evolutionary metaphor, it’s possible for fitter genotypes to lose to less-fit ones through random chance. But in these cases it’s hard to tell whether it’s not actually the case that these languages, while better for some users/use-cases, are actually lacking something that makes them suitable for broader usage. (For example - if a paradigm was incredibly productive, but requires you to have a maths PhD, then you’d expect to see some users claiming the tools are better, at the same time as those tools failing to get broader adoption. I’m not making a specific claim here about lisp, just painting some possible fact patterns that could explain the phenomenon.)

dv_dt 5y ago

Some portion of the value is the precision of thinking that the compute environment and the languages force upon sw engineers. There is gain for businesses in not fudging processes that should have some precise state or flow - independent of the software.

sanderjd 5y ago

Very well put. A common pushback I get when discussing ideas for software solutions is "wouldn't this put people out of work?" and I think the answer is often "yes, but it would employ more, more productively". I think the best evidence of this is that we constantly do it to ourselves with open source and other tools (like fairly cheap and easy to use SaaS tools), to great success. There are probably diminishing returns to this over time, but it doesn't seem to me that we've hit them yet.

marto1 5y ago

> Without the tools that make us productive, we don’t have that value. This combined with relative lack of government regulations. I'd hate to see the day when you'll have to complete 3 separate training programs/licenses just to be allowed to deploy code on the Web.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

I agree this is a misconception but not for the same reasons. What would happen is that all different companies would end up implementing the same functionalities over and over again. I know companies that don't rely on OSS for security reasons and that's exactly what happens. Maybe some companies would step up together and publish a shared There would be a tiny bit more of demands compared to nowadays, SWEs would find it harder to move companies - but I don't think SWEs productivity wouldn't be affected, once they finish onboarding and learning whatever the standard library in a specific company works like.