Computer software/program is a product of research and development, not a product of labor.
Fight me!

You should put this in PMRant, not here

Tell my abused, sweaty, teared up keyboard that.

sladuled throws a punch..
It's not very effective..

I don't know what they taught you at school, but all researchers and developers are a product of labor.

I punch you in a nose, kick in your groins and you fall on the ground. There's a background noise saying "Finish him!". And I do another kick in your belly.

The background voice: "FATALITY".

How did I do? I was expecting you'd be more of a fighter rather a potato :/

any time you want me to fight you - just let me know. I provid a FaaS - fighting-as-a-service and none of my clients have [been able to] expressed any complaints about my services! And that means something!

At most 20% is RnD, the remaining 80+% is hard work. (Often its a lot more than 80% hard work, especially over the lifetime of the software)

Just look at all dead projects that fail when the boring part starts ;)

@Voxera That could fall to pareto principle, that 20% RnD would cost 80% of resource(budget, time, people).

idk mate, many times we procrastinate by doing boring part, instead of solving actual problem. Like when we choose to do the chore when we have homework that is due tomorrow.

@C0D4 Sir, we will take custody of that keyboard from you.

@sladuled you need to read that type chart again.

@netikras Can I get a quote? I request demo immediately! I am sure you will get complaint this time.

@NickyBones I should have listened to the teachers.

It’s a product of typing words on keyboard based on what people with money want no different then work in bakery where you make food that people with money wants.

Research on the other hand is putting money to something that doesn’t exist and nobody knows if someone want it or if it have any purpose.

Research word has been abused by IT companies to make typing on keyboard sound elite thing.

@vane typing is in it self not research, but making prototypes and having users test them is technically research.

@Voxera technically making food without recipes is same research as typing on keyboard and making prototypes

@vane Yeah, sure, nobody knows if someone want COVID-19 vaccine or if it have any purpose.
Can somebody give me an estimate on that please?

@respex yeah because covid vaccine is made from software, let me inject some microcontrollers. Your comparison of living life forms to binary computers is like comparing apples and oranges.

He's 100% right though.
Programming itself is the easy part.
What's hard is coming up with the architecture in the first place

@12bitfloat who's right?

@respex OP

@12bitfloat architecture is not a problem, problem is requirements gathering and proper interpretation of it. Basically everything that is not between keyboard and computer screen and involves human interaction. So problem of software is mostly problem of interaction between humans and finding common language to write stuff down. More like ghost writing then r&d.

@vane That's what I meant with architecture (maybe not the right word though)

Everything that's not just writing code is the hard part (including code architecture)

I don't care what the fuck you want to call it...

But over a 20 year career somebody paid me 1.7 million for fucking something. (humblebrag af)

If you want to line item "labor" as "r&d" that's your fucking business... just cut that fucking paycheck and STFU.

@HiFiWiFiSciFi weird flex, but ok

Okay so how are you gonna put the theory and designs etc to a product without labor?

I am sorry for creating misunderstanding because my lack of capability for expressing my thought in English.

Let me put it this way.
In other industry, like food service, there is still manual labor, like chefs and cooks, who follow recipes. But they don't create recipes everyday.

Developing a software is like creating a recipe or method or procedure, every day, well, work days to be precise. The one who does the labor by following that recipe is computer. That's called automation.

We inadvertently have been eliminating many manual labor that used to be done by human.
There was a time that the alarm is a profession!

My point is to make a distinction between knowledge workers, or labor if you will, that includes us devs, with manual labor. When estimating effort that our job would take.

It is easier to estimate how much time to cook a burger, how much oil it needs, when you have done it over and over following the same recipe.
We devs do not have that privilege. IMHO.

@respex Take into consideration that the main purpose of developing software is to create labor not to remove labor cause historically lack of labor caused very bad things on this planet.

Continuing my thoughts we are in time where we want to transfer labor from require physical strength to labor that require clicks in right places.
We obviously see it in terms of software like various automated platforms and in personalized physical goods.

Going back to topic I don’t know if cooking is the same with tech stack we have right now or we will have after 100 years - maybe if you take a standard classic burger but there are burgers without meat that tastes like burger and you need to ask someone who is highly specialized with food.

My main point is that we all research and develop and it’s not only related to software but the whole humanity evolve into new areas of interests every day.

So opt in that software is in fact product of labor like a burger but thinking about what I want to eat / click is research and those are two different things.

@vane What? Where do you get that from?
The very purpose of software development is to create automation, which is automated labor. That's the exact opposite of manual labor. Of course it created some new jobs. But that raise the bar to get into.

Here's another example. A cook that can produce the same food with same quality every time, the exact replica of a recipe, will be awarded employee of the month.
Now, when a developer produce the same 'product' twice, that person will be fired on the spot.

@respex My perspective is more let’s say philosophical then real but let’s try.

Technically we’re unable to produce same things twice solely based on entropy, how measurements work ( units error rate to be precise ), temperature, pressure etc. This might be not important from the food stand perspective.
From software development perspective if you made one good thing in one company other company can hire you only to do the same things for them. Like there are many books there are many kinds of cooks. There are many kinds of cows who eat many different things. It’s like a butterfly effect. You can’t predict the future 100%.

I’d say software will produce more labor based on how many software developers we had 20 years ago and how many we have now and how many different kinds of income we have due to software we produced to this day. The labor as I pointed above will be just moved to other places, the sooner we get to those places the better for us.

@vane well, making food without recipe is the same as prototyping :)

The moment you repeat a previous dish, its no longer research.

But I would contend that just as for software, minor changes does not really count ;)

@respex A lot of people want a working vaccine.

But none of the companies currently researching vaccines for covid 19 knows if they will succeed, and if they fail, or succeed but to long ofter every one else, there might not be any interest left, every one already got vaccinated.

If you compare that to a building.

The building might be a unique design, but the methods and materials used are well known so the builder does not have to test every part to see if it works.

If you would find a completely new way, like those that experiment with 4D printed building, then your back to research since we still have not find a standard method we know will work well.

@Voxera what about different spices, everyone’s like their meal different, one people like salty other sweet and other people like spicy food. One like mustard other like mayo or ketchup. I picked cooking cause I know a little about it but if I know a little more about fashion I think it’s not different at all.

I know that here are mostly software people that are interested in software but saying that software is different topic and other people are are not interested in their topics cause of same things as we are interested in making software is ridiculous.
It’s like saying that we are not humans.

Yes we are the same and maybe the topics are different but the circumstances behind it are the same.

We are not some comic books heroes and our behaviors and emotions are no different then people who were riding horses and walking in steel armor 600 years ago. Evolution doesn’t run so fast.
We’re just better informed so we don’t trust jerks who caused wars in last century ( I hope so ).

@vane borderline in my opinion :)

At least if you just adjust the amount of common ones.

If you go with something very odd like cinnamon on beef I would consider that experimentation , which is part of research :)

But exactly where to draw the line is probably a subjective opinion.

And personally I rarely use the word research describing what I do.

You have some weird ideas.