Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Philosophy major here that went from working in a bakery, to sales at a large apparel printing company, to writing and marketing at startups.

I do wonder if CS grads are too often narrowly focused on “tech” companies and not on companies that need software.

View on HN

Software tends to be complex enough that you need a lot of people and thus a tech company. It rarely makes sense for a company to make their own software that they only use to internally. Many non tech companies makes their own software but it is shipped to customers as part of the product

Eh it depends. I’ve worked at / with a lot of more traditional non-tech companies and you’d be amazed at how a lot of the software looks like Excel circa 1995.

I guess they could be using third party software but it seems like often they are just using an ancient thing they built themselves.

That tends not to be written by software people so we can ignore it even though you are correct.

People who write software are software people lol. A lot of stuff is just old.

Accountants and marketers didn't build the legacy tools teams are stuck with.

Sounds like you are picturing WinForms in your mind (Was so awesome to create forms and ship really customized usable software quickly). Does business software really need to be super pretty?

No definitely doesn’t need to be pretty. My point is more that building and managing this stuff often requires a programmer. It’s not “cool” or cutting edge but it’s a job.

>It rarely makes sense for a company to make their own software that they only use to internally.

From my understanding China operates this way. They supposedly have such an oversupply of software engineers that every company just build all the software they need internally. Now with AI they have supposedly been super aggressive in adopting it that its probably even more of the case that everyone is building most of what they need internally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com