The venn diagram of tech skills and a non-tech business is where the opportunities are. This applies to many other unrelated skills.
You’re chances of success are 10x higher trying to build technology for tanning salons than it is building the next new docker kubernetes react native infrastructure as a service.
Unsexy sells.
Except tanning salons (or hairstylists or dog walkers or plumbers) usually a) dont have cash to spend b) Dont see their problems as software related c) are in many cases hostile to software, due to geniune bad software
I remember some time ago when I used to hang out in bootstrapped.fm, every week a person would come in and say "Oh I built a software for salons/hairstylists/dog walkers" how I can sell it? 4 weeks later they had shutdown their business, and a new person would come in, rinse and repeat.
This is also why this (very good) advice is not so easy to follow in real life. You need multiple skillsets.
If you're not as well placed as the incumbents at the core product (salon, sure), software will not save you.
If you're better placed than the incumbents at the core product, software doesn't matter.
If you're (roughly) equally placed as the incumbents at the core product, software can help you, but it will likely take a while to realize any competitive advantage.
And, I say placed, because there are a lot of factors at play. There's the quality of the service/product (itself a huge set of variables), pricing, location, and availability, to name a few. None of those will custom software directly help you with.
Guy owned two carwashes in Cary, NC. Thought technology could enable mobile carwashing. Got connected with the right technology people ...
Not for me; it has to be sexy, world and life style changing. I’d rather build something like one of the top used apps or just be an employee at a tech co.
Good if someone can pull it off. But, I believe that company might have sold that feature as an add-on to their existing customers. Otherwise, you know “Sales” are the hard part
That's what I also meant. Even if you start a business, the features that your product would have, will be sold as a "solution" - in layman's terms.
Why we are talking about low-hanging fruit instead of picking them up? I have a hunch they aren't low hanging after all.
The reason for that is the same reason your idea works, most businesses outside the tech bubble stand to gain a lot form software. Currently they have no way to act on it except to hobble together a ruby goldberg of SaaS services or try and cram their businesses into a monolithic piece of software that expects your business to run a certain way.
Most mid-sized companies don't have the skills to manage and deploy software developers that can solve their problems. Those skills tend to be expensive, and the software project, historically, has a high chance of failure.
So, yeah, the high price of tech wages seems to be correct.
I speak from experience in executing some of these kinds of software projects, as I live in a market not influenced by the SV bubble. Our market has a bunch of bootstrapped software businesses too, because the economics of it are more favorable to that kind of enterprise and you're not competing with 200k+ wages. I'm talking about Australia as well, an expensive first world country.
In fact, going into some market and solving a problem with software is almost always done by people not used to work in development that go and write something by themselves.
The answer that I think is a hard pill for some to swallow, is that for a long time we have been the tool required by special kinds of high return business ventures, so we can command high wages. The same is true of remote miners in Australia, the difference is there is no use for a miner in the rest of the community so there is no loss since no one is competing for their wage anyway.
My argument is simply that the rest of the economy could really use software developers, but they are too expensive due to the distortions on commandable salary that the tech bubble has created. It would be nice if software developers returned from the high heavens and integrated their skills more readily with the greater community.
I am a software developer, and I understand the audience I am talking to is the very audience benefiting from the status quo. I don't expect it to be a popular view but I do hope people give it a thought. Think of ways your talent could help your community, and then that is what I am hoping to see more of.
Another way of saying the same thing is that few businesses can see their revenue double by employing even the most skilled plumber. However, many businesses can see there revenue double (or their costs halved) by employing even a mediocre software developer.
So, I would agree it's true that we live in a special time in history where the translation of business needs to computer languages is being demanded at an ever higher and higher rate. But I would disagree with the framing of this phenomenon as a "tech bubble" or a "distortion on commandable salary".
Employing a software developer IS expensive. <- agree
Employing a software developer is TOO expensive <- disagree
- Existing problems get solved.
- New, more important, problems emerge.
- More developers enter the market (bringing down the
cost of development).
- Consumer demands shift over time.
How many of these companies will be around in 10 years in the same form that they are today? Ford has been making vehicles for over 100 years. What will give Meta, as an arbitrary example, that kind of staying power?
As those companies come and go over the next 10-20 years, I think your concern that "the rest of the economy could really use software developers" will be ameliorated. Maybe everyone's actually working on unimportant problems right now, and the wider economy has more important problems for us to solve, but the best and fastest way we've figured out how to discover that we've misallocated resources (whether human or any other kind) is to let everyone make their own decisions and realize the individual gain or loss of their decisions.
In practice the most common option is to have everything run on massive Excel sheets, with spaghetti formulas and VBA coded by long-gone employees or interns. But it works.