[SilverRed]

>But we collectively don't feel a lot of empathy for folks in other industries.

People work for free on things they enjoy and not what others want. This is no shocker.

I don't have builders building me a house for free just for the fun of it. In general in the world, if you want someone to do something that you want and not what they want, you have to compensate them for this work. And this works fantastically for areas where people are willing to pay. The consumer hardware we have today is mind blowingly good and the software to go with it is outstanding.

[parafactual]

I'm not sure anyone is disagreeing with you. That is why they said to get another hobby or craft—so that you might want to write software in neglected areas. And of course financial compensation is good for this too, but I wonder if passion projects are of higher quality.

It is true that "empathy" probably won't help much, though.

[AussieWog93]

>I wonder if passion projects are of higher quality

Based on my personal experience, any software that requires a large team to build and maintain seems to be better when it's commercial (and usually proprietary). This is not the case for one-man software projects.

[josephg]

SQLite, NodeJS, the linux kernel, the rust compiler, postgres and others would like a word.

NodeJS tried to move to an industry governance board model around the release of 0.12, where commercial interests took part in running the project. It nearly killed nodejs entirely.

[eptcyka]

People definitely get paid for work on more than half of those projects.

[josephg]

So? None of them are commercial or proprietary projects - which was the contention. There’s nothing inherent about opensource that precludes having people paid to work on it. It’s just harder.

[beckman466]

> The consumer hardware we have today is mind blowingly good and the software to go with it is outstanding.

It would all be even better if 1) knowledge was de-commoditized (since thanks to digital tech knowledge is now already a non-rivalrous good as it has a zero marginal cost of reproduction) and 2) we used transparent p2p supply chains (http://valueflo.ws + http://holochain.org).

I think today's world is a black box hellworld. I don't think hardware and software are high quality at all. Proprietary tech is a straightjacket. I believe we can definitely escape this hellworld though. Some even say overcoming it is is essential if we want to make it out of global warming:

"The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.”

It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for copyrights, trademarks and patents – should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations. Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity.

In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits."

[weird-eye-issue]

They never said anything about working for free.

[SilverRed]

If you are paying for developers than no "empathy" is needed. Shitty industry software is due to the business clinging on to legacy systems and refusing to invest in new ones. And often they are right, using the legacy software has better business outcomes than spending the money required to make something better. We see that when the investment is made, we get great software. The camera software we have is remarkable compared to what we had 10 years ago.

[josephg]

> If you are paying for developers than no "empathy" is needed.

I don't agree. I think its impossible to make good software without deeply understanding the perspective and needs of your users. Money can be used to hire empathetic designers, but its hard to beat software designed and made and maintained by its users directly.

I worked with a designer years ago who organized a series of user study sessions with our prospective clients. She insisted on each engineer on the team going to at least one of those sessions with her. I thought it was a bit silly - but I went to a couple of meetings and I was shocked. It was hugely eye opening for me - I learned so much. It made our product better, too. Down the track I added some small features to our product that nobody asked for, but which were easy to implement and which our clients loved. It wouldn't have occurred to me to add any of that stuff if I didn't first sit in those meetings and hear things from their perspective.

[lbriner]

> due to the business clinging on to legacy systems and refusing to invest in new ones

This is a massive generalisation and one that I don't think is as clear cut as you make it sound. Most businesses in my experience would happily replace a horrible hard-to-maintain legacy system if...

* It could be done for a reasonable cost * It wouldn't take ages to do or at least they know how long * They knew how to find the right product amongst thousands of sales people telling them to use theirs * They could find a reliable way to migrate to the new system * They weren't heavily regulated and knew they were on the hook for millions in compensation if they get something wrong

I think a bigger reason is that the software engineering industry is only just starting to form a formal trade where quality is assured by agreed processes and you are more likely to get consistency across suppliers closer to medicine and law. At the moment, there are no agreed worldwide regulations for software, there are no requirements for software engineers regarding experience/qualification and many other reasons.

If we can solve some of those, or at least get close, then we help derisk businesses who want to stay competitive but are currently too scared to!