Comment by Gigachad
2 days 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
The accounting is very similar. The processes are not. Small businesses continue to be special snowflakes in terms of how they do their work. Both for good and bad reasons.
I’m surprised an open source accounting package hasn’t popped up that handles the accounting well. The backend could largely be the same (or at least modular) while the front legitimately needs to vary based on what type of work, how sales are done, whether they hold inventory, local taxes, etc, etc.
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.