[randomdata]

> That's not how it works, neither with carpentry nor with neurosurgery nor with concert violinists nor with software engineering.

Not quite a violin, but once upon a time I bought my first guitar and literally two weeks later was playing to a paying crowd of ~100 people. I certainly wasn't producing quality, and still can't, but I found something that a small number of people valued.

Some goes for software. You can create the most horrible monstrosity imaginable, but it can very much still deliver value. The audience who finds that value may be smaller than a master craftsman can attract, but at software scale a small audience is still huge.

[haswell]

And I’d argue the reason these crappy software products often succeed is because they’re made by people who have direct knowledge of the problem.

I know a guy who works in the food industry. Not a CS nerd by any stretch, but he started dabbling in Python, and then got a huge raise because he could use Python to autogenerate PowerPoint decks that present a bunch of otherwise tedious-to-assemble information in a fraction of the time.

Could a professional developer do a better job? Almost certainly.

Did the company need to go find/hire one to achieve a huge efficiency gain? Nope.

Will the same guy be able to spearhead some massive greenfield app dev project? Not anytime soon.

The same thing is happening across industries. People with iPhones and Davinci Resolve are churning out social media content that previously would have required $100Ks of equipment and specialized training.

Will these same people direct the next Oscar winner? Probably not. But that’s beside the point.