Comment by Gigachad
10 hours ago
Most people don’t want to play product manager and just want to pay someone to make the decisions for them.
We used to have a time where every small business had its own custom accounting software, and discovered that these businesses aren’t actually special snowflakes and are better off just using the generic software and conforming to whatever it does
They were better off because the discomfort of shoehorning was less than the discomfort of in-house software development. The latter has changed radically so the conclusion may no longer hold. SWEs would do well to have at least one side project to calibrate their intuition about the cost of delivering and maintaining a greenfield project so that they can spot the niches which have begun to appear even as others live on borrowed time.