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Comment by philmcc | Hacker News Reader

Not touching the whole heft of the argument, I would like to point out that the original poster didn't compare the difficulty of writing a hit song to a "hit app", he compared a creating a hit song with creating working software.

I can co-sign on this part of his premise. I worked for a music producer who has a number of #1 hits (Beyonce, Fergie, John Legend etc). He wrote >1 songs per day almost every day for over a decade.

His success ratio (hit vs placement vs nothing) was much lower than any mediocre software engineer trying to make working software over the same period of time.

It feels safe to say that in a 365 day period, a software developer can reasonably expect significantly more than one of those days to be used in 'working software' right?

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But working software doesn't mean commercially successful software. It just means it runs and does something.

"Working software" would be comparable to "listenable music". I'm sure every song that producer wrote daily was listenable.

But even if you mean "working software" as something that goes up on the app charts, top 100 in a popular category? I mean, then no -- I could easily see a developer spend an entire year building 1, 10, or even 100 apps and have none of them gain any traction at all.

The average income indifference between artists and software developers, and how many of those who make up those communities are able to find any sense of financial stability, are vastly different, so even under your logic that a “hit” is a “hit” no matter the industry, is still really misinformed and I’m sure we are all out here just doing what we are doing for the “love of it”.

Speaking as a producer and developer, they are not the same things in any way and I love doing what I do deeply, thank you very much.

You're still off quite a ways in your analogy. I get paid to develop software that someone else owns and brands and makes all decisions for. For nothing more than money. It's nothing like my passion projects, which I do not get paid for at all. Most of the time. Maybe 1 in a 1000 that I will get paid for them in any meaningful way.

Sorry for the late response, I just mean to suggest that it's pretty clear to me that your average software developer reaps the benefits of his work, day to day, on a higher percentage than your average producer.

There are 4.4 million software engineers in the United States. I would imagine most of the work that is generated by them on a day to day basis moves the needle of their careers forward. I could be wrong, but I bet most of them are employed, and getting paid for it.

At the very least I bet that more than half of them get paid for more than 5% of their workdays, right?

I doubt the same can be said for music producers, at least the ones making hits that the OP was referring to.

This whole analogy between working software and music production is flawed from the start and elaboration on the theme does not help.

What's needed is to discuss artists compensation on their own terms.

Don't distort it by relating it to software development.

This tendency to hyper-analogise everything oh so sinks my boat.

I can’t think of even one example of the use of analogy that has helped me understand a subject better than if it were discussed and explained on its own terms.

It seems all analogies do is enable the analogiser to delude themselves in to thinking similar is equal to same.

Analogies may be less about equivalency and more to do with bridging ideas. They can help the analogiser draw someone closer in thought, like a shout in the dark to help your friend find you

Think of analogies as being like the windscreen wipers on a car. They help you see things more clearly.

But working/usable software takes months ( eg. Billing, authentication, DevOps, ... )

Profitability at least a year except if you can fall back to an existing social network/dev infrastructure, which is also based on a lot of work.

Eg. Only getting a decent ranking in Google could take months.

I'm not sure if it's that easy to compare.

Can you ELI5 what a music producer does? Was he also a writer or is writing part of producing? What is placement?

Everything from composing and performing the entire song, to contributing a couple of claps during the outtro. It's a very loose term.

So hard to put into words because the role is so varied but thinking of them as an artistic coach or mentor to the band while recording is perhaps accurate enough. Often hated or loved by the band and or fans of the band for the direction they push the music and the overall sound of the music.

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