[karpierz]

The parent's point is that you don't make money by casting arbitrary spells, you make money by solving problems for people. You happen to solve them by casting spells, but they're not paying you for the spell, they're paying to make the problem go away.

[dusted]

Exactly, and the value gained by solving the problem is going to be larger than the value of the spells that did it. Nobody is going to pay more money for a program than they're going to make from having that program.

[cableshaft]

> Nobody is going to pay more money for a program than they're going to make from having that program.

Maybe not intentionally. Unintentionally, though, it happens all the time!

Like I've worked on several games for small companies that failed to find an audience and didn't sell well upon release, as well as large new initiatives for large corporations that either never fully materialized or were made to sell with a couple of clients in mind that never ended up signing the contract so those projects ended up getting discarded after the corporation had me put several months of work into them.

Thankfully I've also worked on programs that have had a lot of impact as well.

[dusted]

True, it was vaguely worded..

Nobody pays for software with the intention to pay more money for a program than they believe they will save or earn from the services of that program.

[malthuswaswrong]

There are exceptions. Mostly in the realm of regulations. Sometimes you pay for programming that you simply have to do by law, even if you don't actually want it.

[Retric]

Except division of labor means people are paying people for the actual casting vs any other task. Therefore if you can cast the spells of 4 people that adds actual value directly.

Plenty of other things add more value, but replacing 4 or more people at 200k a pop is already significant money.