The Great Deflation Is Great
In most fields, software is so crappy, it's practically a bad word. The great deflation in software costs is very good news.
In most fields, software is so crappy, it’s practically a bad word. Next time you are in the dentist’s office, or standing in line at the DMV, or on the phone with your insurance company, ask them how much they like their software. The answer, almost universally, is “it needs to die in a fire”.
This post from Tess earlier in the week captures it pretty well:
What’s the deal? Why is all this software so bad?
It isn’t because people who make software hate you, or think you deserve bad software. It’s because, from an economic viewpoint, good software is hard to get. Code is so difficult to create—so cryptic and fragile, so precise—that it’s very expensive to make. Even bad software is extremely expensive, let alone good software. This great passage from Paul Ford’s NYT editorial this week puts it in perspective:
When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this. When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000.
So when Tess talks about “deflation”, this isn’t a hyperbolic AI insider term. Literal financial deflation on the order of 100-1000x.
Is this sad for the software business? I guess it depends on who you ask. For example, if you look at the team that Paul theorizes would have worked on that data transformation project:
That last price is full 2021 retail — it implies a product manager, a designer, two engineers (one senior) and four to six months of design, coding and testing. Plus maintenance.
What he’s describing there is accurate, but that is sad! Conceptually, the work he’s describing isn’t really worth $350K; that’s just what it costs. But that means we don’t get enough of something that’s useful and good. We get mediocre software at best.
Imagine if we didn’t have … I don’t know, industrial corn production. A world where every ear of corn is lovingly grown and harvested by a human. In that world, a cheese enchilada would cost, what, $300?
Enchiladas are good, but not $300 good.
And likewise, converting a thorny data set is good, but not $350K good. It’s just out of whack with the actual value of the result, owing entirely to the scarcity and difficulty of the work.
So yes, you should be cheering, cheering, cheering.
If you make a living in tech, and you’re not following this curve and producing 10x as much value as you did before, you’ll have trouble staying employed. That’s individually sad, but there’s so much room for better software, we should still be able to justify employing lots of programmers who work with this much longer lever. They become more valuable, not less.
But maybe more importantly, if you’re someone who’s not in tech, and you’re interested in making apps yourself, this is very good news. All that terrible software out there in the world has some new competition: you!
If you want to read more about how the landscape of making software is changing, particularly for people who didn’t previously consider themselves to be “engineers”, subscribe here:
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