Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Because for many people writing code is exactly their job, it isn't a means to an end.

It is like replacing people at the supermarket with self checkouts and expext they still feel fulfilled on their job, replenishing products from the warehouse.

Additionally only optimistics cannot see their job is in jeopardy.

If you deploy 10x faster, than me as business owner need less of you for the same amount of work.

No, the need for work doesn't grow exponentially every year, there is a physical limit to distribute among all people offering delivery capabilities.

Finally its environment impact destroys all the progress that was made in the last years, and brings computers prices back to the 1980's.

View on HN

> If you deploy 10x faster, than me as business owner need less of you for the same amount of work

An important consideration here is that velocity is not zero sum. If you are delivering in weeks what used to take months you are creating an entirely new realm of what is possible to do with software within a corporation.

In the real world, I have never worked for a company that doesn't have a huge backlog (either tracked or in engineers heads) of work that would never be done because it wasn't economic under the old model. This tends to apply to the internal work of engineers (developer tooling, infrastructure, tech debt, etc) more than anything else. 10X faster doesn't necessarily mean shipping 10X product code. You can use that productivity boost to accelerate prototyping, ship betas faster, move the iteration loop faster, all while shipping higher quality code with less tech debt and having the time to continuously improve the engineering side of things that the business never sees.

Most companies aren't software houses.

If you fulfill your delivery contract in half the time, great for me, you now need track down another customer.

Or put in another way, an agency now only needs a third of previous team sizes to deliver the same amount of work.

The other two thirds might be lucky to have another project assigned, or get to seat on the bench, and depending on the world region (offshoring shops) get their salary halved, before being fired if seating too long on the bench.

But less people to build something means more companies will he able to build something, this math will be interesting in the future. Also there will be a exponentially more stuff to maintain.

No it doesn't, that is the MBA thought process of exponential curves of endless sales that always ends in layoffs when real world physics reality check kicks in.

The amount of customers willing to buy a specific product is limited.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com