Hacker News

points by causal 3 days ago | 0 comments

I have been pondering whether I am a fool to continue to go it as an employee in the age of AI.

I wonder how much companies would pay people to NOT replicate their products. Like, if I'm just hacking around with my LLM, and am approaching a near 100% drop-in replacement for the entire Atlassian suite--how much would they pay me to NOT do that? Is that worth 1 livable wage to them?

There's an alternate employment arrangement...

[–] NichoPaolucci 2 days ago

Well... I think the converse to this is the companies that WOULD pay you (slightly less than they currently pay Atlassian) TO replicate those products.

I expect some BRUTAL competition for these larger software companies. My company just recently replaced our CRM with an in-house tool. (Of course, the maintenance / buildout of that is costly, but it's eventually going to be less than we are paying for the third-party CRM)

Honestly, I cannot personally decide whether or not this is Jevon's Paradox in action or not. In theory, that software could be entirely hands off (Claude write me a 1:1 implementation of Salesforce CRM and make it never go down) but in reality, someone is going to want it tweaked, modified, changed, and thus we now have an internal CRM that we own that requires some level of expertise. Maybe it's not a software engineer, but a software engineer is probably the most well equipped to take that process over...

Who knows, though.

[–] causal 3 days ago

The install base is worth way more than the software

[–] chasd00 2 days ago

I think the would absolutely love you as a competitor.

[–] flir 3 days ago

It was never the coding that was hard, it was always the marketing.

[–] prmph 3 days ago

The coding is hard, unless by coding you mean slapping together CRUD forms. Many businesses are undone or fail to grow properly by neglecting this. This refrain that everything about starting a software business is hard except the coding needs to die.

If the coding was nothing, every good marketing guy could go solo and start large software businesses. It does not happen. You mostly see successful technical founders, or usually a marriage of technical and business cofounders.

Finding a fit between viable business opportunities and the tech to address it is what's hard, and requires several skills: technical, marketing, communication, product design, etc.

[–] jaynetics 3 days ago

At least for us dev types.

[–] flir 2 days ago

Thanks. I thought that was implicit, but I guess not.

[–] random_cat_8745 3 days ago

and infrastructure, it can be costly

[–] pmarsh 2 days ago

And customer support. Unless you aren't going to sell to humans they're going to break/not RTFM/have asks.

[–] esseph 3 days ago

Might be just as bad, possibly worse, if you aren't BigCo.