[roofer]

This is exactly how people were thinking about housing market back in 2005. It's a bedrock on which US economy is built and blah, blah, blah...

Yes tech is the future - AI, VR, and etc. But most of us are writing web and mobile apps, and lots of those apps are not that useful.

[300bps]

Do some side work for a local business and you'll see how powerful code can be. I did 20 hours side work per week for four years and small projects were able to replace teams of employees that used to hand calculate and process work items. Those teams were able to be moved to other tasks saving companies millions of dollars per year while still growing rapidly.

[cachemiss]

While it certainly is more efficient to automate those employees away, in my experience they are rarely assigned to new work, they are simply let go. Whether or not that's good or bad morally or for the economy I won't speculate on.

Most companies are actually quite overstaffed for various reasons, freeing up X employees in department Y doesn't mean they slide over to department Z, Z already has more than enough employees usually.

[cjarrett]

my first paid coding work was at a wind energy company as an intern. I did a lot of manual input into a piece of software for 9/10s of my internship. The other 1/10th of my internship was writing a web-app that acted as a counter for each type of legal document category. They had created their own documentation system with project-Category-count schema. Each of the employee within the compliance group had to figure out the current doc-count for any new document's category, and there was no real gating mechanism before the document entered the hard-copy vault. This led to numerous duplicate items (ala, two documents labelled HR-1042-4).

My simple web app, which took virtually no mental effort to create other than learning the source code system and some vanilla Web App / SQL, was treated as a god-send to those employees. It was still being used 6 years later, though I've lost track relatively recently. Always interesting to hear interesting stories like that out there.

My brother's workplace (from my distant vantage point, keep in mind) could have saved millions upon millions of dollars had it had a dedicated technical engineer working on crafting automated reports that connected their massive databases of data to its operational scientists instead of spending 2-4 hours on building the report themselves during the worst time-crunches.

[st3v3r]

"Those teams were able to be moved to other tasks saving companies millions of dollars per year while still growing rapidly."

Although in all likelihood, they were fired.

[jmagoon]

Same--when you work for a large company you see that a ton of development is about large companies cutting cost through automation. Its unfortunate to be a hatchet man, but that work always exists in economical downtime.

[addicted]

So you're arguing for consulting companies?

[joshvm]

It's a lucrative business to be in. If you have niche technical competency there's a lot of funding to be had from companies that have problems to solve.

You're unlikely to hit millions like you would from a VC, but you can be solving very tangible problems rather than the stereotypical "Uber for X". And you would be amazed at how much companies are happy to spend on products that work.

[petra]

I know regular custom software usually comes through the consulting channel, but i'm curious if machine learning and deep learning have gotten to the stage of maturity/simplicity that consulting companies offer them to their medium/small clients ?

[joshvm]

I work in computer vision, so ML is kinda ubiquitous in the field and there are definitely startups that are selling deep learning as-a-service (canonical example is Clarifai).

The main issue with deep learning is that for a small/medium client, there isn't enough data to train on. Lot of clients want classification software of some kind, but often it's binary and you don't need anything as complex as a CNN.

There are a few big frameworks for vision, like Halcon, which include SVM and neural net implementations (and loads of other stuff). You can provide training examples and it'll do the rest for you. It's not cheap and you have to charge for licenses, but they even have their own little scripting language as well as hooks for C++. The idea is you can use any camera, drag and drop functions and get your solution out. I've never used it, but I've seen their sales demos and they're quite slick.

[roofer]

Good point