Ask HN: Is the market Tech selloff an opportunity for good software? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is the market Tech selloff an opportunity for good software?

1 pointdfps6 comments

Employment, particularly for juniors is perceived to be down, but there are a lot of trained coders.

People have been unhappy with BigTech products for a decade or so. Data selling, no privacy or security, closed source, etc. But BigTech has had massive public and government inflows because of profits/data usage, which has caused it to withstand any criticism (in addition to allowing it to buy out any competitors or politico-legally destroy them).

So with all these trained coders without jobs, and no real goal of trying to get hired by the 5-10 giant companies for $300k a year plus playgrounds, will they actually give us some quality, FOSS, secure options to the tech everyone uses but hates, maybe in a year or two?

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Yup also called the "phoenix effect" or "entrepreneurial recycling" or "second-wave innovation".

Not FOSS necessarily but you will see lot of new startups exploring new niches.

We saw it after the dotcom bubble burst, 2008 GFC, Cryto/NFT implosion 22-23 (shifting people to AI).

FOSS is mostly big tech funded these days. They use some library long enough, get dependent on it and then end up assigning funds for maintenance. Or the other way round where they build something internally - run out of budget to keep it running - open source to community.

Usually, if there is no alternative for something that's universally hated, the reason is the enormous resources needed for the replacement.

Want to make a better search engine than Google and Bing together? Sure, that's easy! Crawling, storing and querying the index - you don't have that money.

Want to create a better browser than Chrome/Firefox? Sure, go for it - just get 2 million work hours.

Want some OpenAI replacement? Get a few thousand GPUs first.

CloudFlare captchas don't let you through? Just build your own wordwide backbone along with a huge CDN network, and off you go.

etc.

No.

If only ...

Are you going to pay them to?

Don't you think coding is being reassessed in terms of cash value? Egyptian scribes.

Other ways of payment include donations. But in general coded products will (don't you think?) not be cash compensated in the same way as when coding was scarce ('Please take this $300k per year and I don't even care if you complete your tasks!') and there weren't enough products out there yet (the opposite situation as current), and the incumbents were protected by government partnerships.

There are other compensations, but this only applies to people who care about things other than exclusively making the most possible money. Luckily, the workforce now includes many coders so a percentage will be interested in creating products that actually benefit people and are secure.

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