Ask HN: Is open source reducing engineer's jobs?

[noteanddata]

while lots of the software would need lots of engineer's jobs to create them, today a lot of them are just taken from github. I think at one point it was creating more jobs because it makes the history progress faster, however now is it reducing jobs ?

[protoduction]

I think it reduces jobs the same way as having tools like electronic screwdrivers available cheaply reduces jobs.

Instead of everybody having to create their own screwdrivers prior to starting a construction job, they can focus on building whatever they want to build.

I would argue that's a good thing: it increases productivity and decreases duplicated effort.

[noteanddata]

many people have a statement like this, however most of the jobs would probably not be needed any more because of the new tools and new end to end automated systems. and there are not so many new jobs to be created all the time.

once the productivity is high enough, most of people in the world would probably not able to find a job.

people who control the asset would probably control most things and others can hardly live.

open source is kind of accelerating the process

[saluki]

Open source gives engineers better frameworks and components to use so you can develop better apps than if you started from scratch on your own.

It still takes engineers to use the frameworks even if they are open source.

I think open source and the web have created more jobs rather than reducing them.

With open source you can learn from existing projects, pull in projects to your work to save time.

This time savings can be used to create and improve other custom features in what you are building.

If anything I would say open source is creating jobs and empowering developers to learn new techniques, create better apps and level up in knowledge and earning power.

I think it's also allowing people to get in to programming that wouldn't have a chance otherwise if you had to pay for every framemork/tool you wanted to use so open source creating more opportunities than it's reducing.

And open source can be a full time job. https://calebporzio.com/i-just-hit-dollar-100000yr-on-github...

I think open source is great for the industry/world.

So many amazing frameworks, tools, packages out there.

Kudos to everyone who maintains an open source project.

[noteanddata]

"Open source gives engineers better frameworks and components to use so you can develop better apps than if you started from scratch on your own. " ---> I totally agree on this. however, if it originally takes 100 years for all engineers to fully realize all the features to be developed, now it may only takes 50 years, after that there probably only need very few engineers to write the software

[muzani]

Four years ago, I did a startup. Payment gateways were too complex back then and had too many legal restrictions. Logistics were not mature. We had to do all of this in house. But we didn't have economy of scale, so it was too expensive to build our own payment gateway and logistics, and the startup faced financial difficulties when scaling.

Today, it would have been a lot easier to do the same startup. We would have made more money, hired more people, paid above market average.

The goal of a business is to just focus on whatever they built and reach out to as many people as possible. Netflix does one thing. They don't build their own DRM or CA. They also pay the highest salaries in the range where possible. Maybe there would have been more Netflix jobs if one component wasn't done or if they had to build their own browsers. But they likely wouldn't have scaled as big or made as much profit, and would have been cutting salaries or reluctant to hire, trying to compete with something like HBO.

React is another example. Now there are countless React jobs instead of people using HTML+jQuery to build the same things. Has it increased productivity? It probably has, else why would people use it. But it's opened even more jobs.

Software is just never done. There's always more features to add and refine, more wealth to create.

[noteanddata]

the productivity is definitely increased. but I do have a question about "software is just never done", many software jobs reduced over time, one day there might only be very few jobs needed.

[burntoutfire]

Not neccessarily, because, thanks to the free opensource tools and libraries, people can be hired to work on lower-value or speculative (startups) projects, which wouldn't otherwise have economic merit. E.g. Facebook wouldn't probably have happened if Linux and PHP were not free.