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keedayesterday at 10:00 PM1 replyview on HN

> The world only needs so much software.

Around the time of the dot com crash, there was a decent amount of rhetoric advising students and job seekers against getting into the software industry, because it was getting "too saturated." The thinking was there's just not that much work to go around, especially for the number of people flocking to the field. And the crash just reinforced that narrative.

But even as a student back then, I could tell that there was unlimited scope for software. Pretty much any cognitive thing we do manually could be done in software. I once idly tried to enumerate those and quickly realized there was soooo much to do. Plus, I also understood that the more you do things a new way, a lot more things pop up that we haven't even imagined yet. The possibilities were countless. It was clear that the "saturation" narrative stemmed from a lack of people's imagination and understanding of what software really was.

I just knew that this field would never get saturated because it was impossible to run out of things to write software for.

But these days...

I mean, I know we will always have new software to build as things evolve, which they will do faster than ever with AI. But these days, I wonder if it's now possible to write software faster than we can imagine new things to do.


Replies

EMIRELADEROyesterday at 10:34 PM

> Pretty much any cognitive thing we do manually could be done in software.

Yes, although I suggest being careful with that kind of thinking.

https://www.orwell.ru/library/novels/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/...

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