[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.