[Swizec]

The problem with hiring artisans is that most companies need a Honda Civic not an Enzo Ferrari.

If they hire an artisan it’s just going to be frustrating for everyone involved. The business will pay more than the value received and wonder wtf and the artisan will be bored out of their mind looking for fun projects to do.

[zrobotics]

One thing where that analogy breaks down is that a Honda civic is more highly engineered and a more refined product than a Ferrari. The Ferrari makes all sorts of sacrifices for performance and styling, sacrifices such as manufacturability, cost, and reliability. We tend to forget or underestimate the sheer work that Honda engineers spend making a car that is fuel efficient, crashworthy, long-term reliable, and affordable. A civic certainly isn't as sexy as a Ferrari, but stepping back and thinking about the sheer amount of human effort that went into making such a good machine at such a reasonable (compared to a Ferrari) price is astounding.

I would argue that software would be improved if it was approached in the same engineering fashion as a civic or corolla, what we have now is the engineering effort of a Ferrari with all the warts that entails but released to the mass-market. Ferrari can't invest the engineering effort to release as polished of a product as Honda or Toyota, but that's fine since it's a niche vehicle and the buyers accept the tradeoffs since nobody uses one as a daily commuter anyway. But a small team of software developers can release an under-designed product to market and that software is available nearly instantly worldwide with little limits. Making 1M physical items is far more difficult than having 1M users of a program.

[ahoka]

This is a false dichotomy.