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Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

> I don’t believe anyone in the world is truly passionate about things like payroll software.

I actually think that’s probably not a good assumption. I know you’re being pejorative, but imagine a scenario where someone has been working for years as a payroll administrator or someone who’s been a consultant working on implementing payroll systems for decades. People learn the market and get sick of the status quo and have tons of new ideas. I could easily see someone get excited about a way to make their job easier, more fun, more efficient, etc. and go and launch a new payroll software startup that just improves everything.

My point is: good entrepreneurs are passionate about solving problems. Sometimes those problems might “seem” boring but don’t assume they are.

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But this assumes that the payroll administrator became that and liked that job in the first place.. and probably the person graduating college did not say “I want to work on payroll”, they probably said “I need to find a way to pay off my student loans.”

I’m sorry but I still don’t agree

> imagine a scenario where someone has been working for years as a payroll administrator or someone who’s been a consultant working on implementing payroll systems for decades

These people hate their jobs and only do it for money. No reasonable person would ever do this for fun. Creating new payroll software is just a means to an end that you have to slog through to deal with the interesting problem of running a company, engineering, or making money. The idea that an entrepreneur should love payroll software is ridiculous

Do you have a list of interests that a reasonable person likes?

Based on my experiences people love wildly different things. I've met plenty of people loving things that I would avoid at almost any cost.

I would guess that your view of a reasonable person is what you see in the mirror. It's not even clear to me why payroll software is so bad. It's not what I spend time on, but it seems like something plenty of engineers would like because the requirements are pretty clear and stable.

I'm sorry but this is just not true. I understand this is your perspective but "these people hate their jobs and only do it for money" is impossibly wrong. Sure, some people hate their jobs, but they're probably not the ones who are thinking about ways to make their jobs more efficient and almost certainly aren't the ones who are going and launching new companies.

I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs start a lot of companies (and started several myself). Many of which you'd think were "boring" -- log aggregation, devops metrics, auto parts retailing, CRM.

I can assure you that in every single case, the founders were truly passionate about the problems they set out to solve.

That’s an opinion that could make the bearer pretty miserable in life.

I am an entrepreneur, and I make software in fields that you’d find super niche and dull, yet I am pretty excited about making quality software, making clients happy, and building a team that I can rely on in delivering our services.

I think this is a theory of mind issue. People find motivation in various ways. I admit that payroll software sounds like one of the most boring things imaginable, but it's also one of the most useful and relevant things imaginable as well, since it has a direct impact on people and makes many things easier. I can definitely understand a specialized programmer taking pride in their craft. And why shouldn't they? They're solving real problems and not making superfluous flashy products or skinner boxes.

I'd even say that payroll software could be a lot more interesting than many other fields. If done right, it shouldn't just be a boring tool that adds some numbers - it should educate its user about the current legislation (e.g. about employee status, tax optimisation), be useful for hiring and budgeting decisions, integrate with banking and accounting software,... I bet tax software isn't too bad, either.

And at the end of the day, the dev hasn't leeched time and money away from some kids, but helped to make a real problem easier instead.

ONe project I was involved with (and still recall, 20+ years later) probably falls in the "as boring as it can be" bracket. We were working on a system that would transfer data between a bank and the tax office. This system would send files from the bank to the tax office, when someone paid "taxes due" and fetch files from the tax office to the bank when the tax office saw that taxes had been over-paid.

All it did was "shuffle files back and forth" (with some data conversion between different IBM formats thrown in, for good measure).

But, I still recall the project 20+ years later, with some amount of pride. Partially because it was delivered on-spec, on time (well, it was delivered on Dec 23th and the deadline was Dec 31st, but as there'd be no one at the customer between xmas and new year...) and just a fraction under budget, with an exceedingly happy customer...

Hi,

As someone who worked in this space for just shy of a decade, you're wrong. The problems often reduce down to challenges that are familiar to most people in large scale software (CRUD entry, redistribution of %s or #s, scaling and performance, testing, etc), and people who love their craft will enjoy solving those challenges. It's like saying no one could ever possibly enjoy math; just silly.

I think you're contradicting yourself. Creating new (payroll) software ticks all the boxes you mention, ie running a company (I can run a company that produces payroll s/w), engineering (writing s/w is engineering, no?), making money (selling payroll f/w is making money). So why do you say that this cannot be fun?

The problem domain is only a means to an end. It could be anything, but payroll in this case might be where somebody sees an opportunity to take advantage of just for access to what they really want. I don’t understand why people (and the original article) act like it’s wrong to not care about the problems being solved or to hate the process. It’s just a pet peeve of mine.

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