←back to thread

413 points martinald | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.195s | source
Show context
nine_k ◴[] No.46197061[source]
Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players.

From where I sit, right now, this does not seem to be the case.

This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software.

replies(28): >>46197121 #>>46197162 #>>46197191 #>>46197790 #>>46198132 #>>46198182 #>>46198282 #>>46198425 #>>46198498 #>>46198608 #>>46198655 #>>46198747 #>>46198991 #>>46199214 #>>46199310 #>>46199646 #>>46199706 #>>46201118 #>>46201177 #>>46202111 #>>46202477 #>>46202670 #>>46203360 #>>46204030 #>>46204863 #>>46204917 #>>46207989 #>>46214063 #
phantasmish ◴[] No.46198608[source]
Something weird happened to software after the 90s or so.

You had all these small-by-modern-standards teams (though sometimes in large companies) putting out desktop applications, sometimes on multiple platforms, with shitloads of features. On fairly tight schedules. To address markets that are itty-bitty by modern standards.

Now people are like “We’ll need (3x the personnel) and (2x the time) and you can forget about native, it’s webshit or else you can double those figures… for one platform. What’s that? Your TAM is only (the size of the entire home PC market circa 1995)? Oh forget about it then, you’ll never get funded”

It seems like we’ve gotten far less efficient.

I’m skeptical this problem has to do with code-writing, and so am skeptical that LLMs are going to even get us back to our former baseline.

replies(6): >>46198699 #>>46198960 #>>46199108 #>>46199504 #>>46201032 #>>46204436 #
1. strken ◴[] No.46201032[source]
Part of this is the huge ZIRP-driven salary bubble in the US. If good software engineers were as cheap as good structural engineers, you'd be able to stick three of them in a room for $500k a year and add a part-time manager and they'd churn out line-of-business software for some weird little niche that saves 50 skilled-employee-years per year and costs $20k a seat.

The bubble means that a) the salaries are higher, b) the total addressable market has to justify those salaries, c) everyone cargo cults the success stories, and so d) the best practices are all based on the idea that you're going to hyperscale and therefore need a bazillion microservices hooked up to multiple distributed databases that either use atomic clocks or are only eventually consistent, distributed queues and logs for everything, four separate UIs that work on web/iOS/android/desktop, an entire hadoop cluster, some kind of k8s/mesos/ECS abomination, etc.

The rest of the world, and apparently even the rest of the US, has engineering that looks a little more like this, but it's still influenced by hyperscaler best practices.