That is fascinating to me, because virtually all my friends have heard of SAP outside of IT - as users or recipients. My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc.

At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused, and occasionally in a bit of a bubble (which is fine - I come here to get away from my daily mainstream IT grind and see excited people talk about cool things:), yet a hundred reasonably successful startups won't employ or touch near as many people as a single "quietly" successful traditional behemoth.

I'm in Germany and of course everyone here has at least heard of SAP and knows it's huge, but I guess not many people know just how huge. SAP consultancy is a big market here with lots and lots of job openings. I knew a few people who did that, it's usually a very well paid job, but it's well paid because otherwise no one in his right mind would do it. From what I heard, it's incredibly boring while at the same time incredibly stressful when you're on-site. Also, I've never met anyone who actually liked SAP.

Want your mind to be blown even more? I worked for a multinational company, I would not be surpised that this company is among the top 10 SAP customers worldwide. Well, everybody hated hated hated SAP, it was a huge hindrance instead of any help.Any use beyond of a "dumb" database was a huge PITA, and I am not fully convinced that all in all it helped more than damaged the business. It was clunky, unintutive, slow, ugly, archaic and a long etc. There were these guys, that were trained as "experts" but they frankly behave more like witch doctors. SAP is coasting just by its name and legacy but from my POV is ripe for the taking. It is not easy though, ERP systems are hard, and changing them ever harder, but in my fantasy world I would like to develop some program and would be very happy to skim 0.00001% of their income.

Coming from the opposite direction (mgmt consulting for big corps -> startup), I was very familiar with the ERP concept, but am still super confused by the ERP market. Every so often I look for an ERP for our company, but am always disappointed by the options. It seems there's an uncanny valley between Quickbooks and SAP, but maybe the issue is just one of discoverability.

We've slowly stitched together an assortment of SaaS tools, custom built modules, and Excel files in the exact way I swore we would never do. If anyone's been through this hell before, I would appreciate some help.

SAP is a German company so here everybody knows about it. There is even a startup strategy called "unbundling SAP" where you pick one feature of SAP, do it 10x better and target a smaller but still huge market. Examples for such companies are: Personio (500M valuation), Cellonis (2.5B valuation)

A friend of mine worked for Sun in the late 90's and mentioned SAP to me.

He told me companies would buy top-of-the-line (overpriced) hardware and pay a premium to get SAP up and running, because they would plug their company into it and recoup their costs almost overnight. It would just do say currency conversions or other super-boring non-core-business things better and save a pile of cash.

You can't save yourself rich, but sometimes the difference between a profitable quarter and a horrendous loss might be your accounting software or your tax software...

Oh yes, there are tons of giants creating software for health applications you never heard of, defense purposes you cannot hear about, logistic you would never consider (managing competitions, port services, private jet traffic, truck fleets...) and so on.

And those don't use $LATEST_TECH, $FANCY_FRAMEWORK or $EXOTIC_LANGUAGE.

They use $BORING_TECH, $OLD_LANGUAGE, $DEPRECATED_FRAMEWORK.

They are not in the cloud, don't update often, have to deal with legacy stacks, stacked on a stack of legacy stacks, and administrative burden from left to right.

Those are the ones that pay for an Oracle licence, and sync it to dozens of excel sheets from an FTP and a lone Access DB, where all auth is manage by a Tomcat service actually proxying to Active Directory and their custom CRM.

And they certainly don't have a team of 10x programmers. In fact, most are windows dev that never used the terminals and don't have admin rights on their machine.

I should know, I make half of my income going from company to company to train their team.

They are everywhere.

They make billions.

SAP is amongst the least fun software category which is ERP systems.

Highly customised, to the point that upgrades are impossible.

Extremely complex systems. So complex that vendor lock in is assured, and the lock in means big prices.

And yet a good business because ERP systems are at the core of any medium to big business.

It's grindy, boring, challenging without being fun work, often using non standard technologies that have been developed by the ERP systems vendor, which help ensure lock in.

ERP companies like SAP and Oracle are the absolute best at making money on services - they know how to charge huge huge amounts and get away with it. There's TONS of money there.

I wouldn't want to work in that area though.

My sister-in-law graduated with a degree in Industrial Engineering, and got exposed-to/proficient-in SAP at one of her first jobs. Now, she does SAP consulting work, much of it from home (even before COVID-19), at a significant pay bump and highly flexible hours.

The crazy thing is for most of the world people use Windows and SAP and firewalled intranets and no external email. Apple laptops and free access to the internet and SV culture is a tiny minority of what the world's computing looks like.

I'd imagine the smart startup engineer folks will never know o this market because they're either working at some place like Google or doing their own thing, and one would need to have worked at a less sophisticated blue chip company to be exposed to these flawed systems.

When I was starting school, my dad had informed me that SAP was HUGE, and consultants with SAP skills were pulling in 200k, back when even google employees were still waiting to IPO.

I've got a - maybe silly - question: Do you think that software engineers read about the business of technology?

I mean, some of these behemoths (or used-to-be behemoths) of technology, like Oracle and Intel and Microsoft (Ok - everyone knows them) and Dell and Apple (mostly the 2nd one) and places like SAP (which is arguably the biggest database and logistics and supply chain (sans the EDI middle-ware vendors on the planet) and Synnix (which is arguably the largest ODM supplier of white label servers to the largest data centers in the world), and, well, Wistron? BBG? (Submarine - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/submarine-cables/) Satellites? Aerospace? What it takes to wire our world together?

This is not a criticism - it is simply curiousity - as a tech person - you don't read up on (or do you think people do or do not read up on?) the way the world works technologically?

My son graduated with an engineering degree recently and his friends always want me to take them to lunch (free food!), but also so I can tell them how the world is connected (power, telecom, SDN, Satellites (launch - cradle-to-grave), and I'm always a little amazed because I grew up libraries of books and they've got google, but want to be lectured?

I guess I don't understand. If you have a moment, could you edumacate me?

Hey! I'm David, the editor of the post you linked to. If there are any other topics you're interested in learning about, please let me know! We wrote another one on Salesforce (https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/) that was well received on HN too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115). We were thinking about writing about Marketo / marketing automation solutions next. (I'm david AT retool.com)

(As an aside — when we started Retool, we ourselves didn't expect the "custom internal tools" to be such a big market. As it turns out, we now have customers that spend $400M+ / year on building custom, homegrown, internal tools! While we [or any single vendor] certainly can't capture all of it, our goal is to capture some percent of it.)

You really have to be living in an alternate universe if you haven't heard about SAP. To me it feels like every other job involves some work with it.

SAP was just nominated (together with Deutsche Telekom) the contractor for the official German Vivid tracking app (Covid-warn-App), just saying

I work in B2B software and almost all of our clients use SAP. It's absolutely massive.

My company is using SAP so it is very familiar to me. But before I joined my company, I have never heard of SAP. There are some good industry process knowledge that gives them an advantage and the software is good once you get used to it. But it can definitely be 10X better (there is a big opportunity to make it easier to customize or integrate with other software) . However, once you become their customer, the switching cost is very high even though there is better software in the market. That makes it difficult for startup to break into this market.

most people would be similarly surprised that $1T-market-cap microsoft is a business & enterprise software company, rather than a consumer one. it's ~80-90% of their $130B in yearly revenue (hard to get more precise because of the way they report their numbers).

> ..78% of the world’s food all flow through SAP?

Having worked in food industry as IT about 20y ago, we used to have fragmented system portfolio, and were struggling to pull data from one system to another. The around 2002 management decided to switch to SAP. I remember working on the storage/capacity/CPU aspect of it (and mid-migration I left the company and completely missed on the SAP train in my career). That food company was providing milk, yogurt, cheese, juice, ice-cream to about 25mil people (customer base). That's SAP for you right there. So that 78% doesn't surprise me at all. I believe the remaining 23% is too small to invest that amount of $$$ nad just hasn't done it yet.

When you get the ability to "track every cucumber" from pick to sell, cut down on fraud, errors, be able to calculate every bit of profit, loss, why would you go anywhere else? I understand the initial cost may be hefty, but once you set it up (good and well), you can stop focusing on that, and see how to grow the business parts of your business, and not the admin.

> Oracle and SAP are so dominant that even Microsoft uses SAP instead of their own ERP offering, Microsoft Dynamics.

This is insane. If it's hard for a company like Microsoft to move away from SAP and shift to their own solution (hence saving face in addition to the $$$), I can't imagine anyone switches software in the ERP world

I work for SAP and it's surprising to me that not even other engineers in the Bay Area have heard of the company despite its campus in Palo Alto and their sponsorship of the "SAP Center" in San Jose. Do you file expenses? You probably use SAP Concur. Do you order office materials or equipment? You may use SAP Ariba. Have you taken part in interviewing a candidate coworker, or have you done yearly career goal planning? You may have used SuccessFactors for that. And this doesn't even count SAP proper's offerings (HANA/S4, etc).

In my opinion the civilization in question does not have steam-powered airships unfortunately, but it does have some really overpriced crap.

Believe it or not, there was business software in the 90s. They were called *RP. ERP = Enterprise Resource Planning, MRP = Material Resource Planning, CRM = Customer Relationship Management. Home-grown code hacks to run a business cannot do what these companies can do, that’s why they’re expensive.

It seems that the market is big enough to allow unicorns making "plugins" like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation to emerge.

Thanks for sharing, very interesting to read.

> basic installation of SAP has 20,000 database tables, 3,000 of which are configuration tables. In those tables, there are ~8,000 configuration decisions you need before even getting started

Wow, this is nuts. 20,000 database tables?

I did an internship at the SAP HQ in Germany more than a decade back.

The work was exceedingly boring. But they had excellent lunch. Better than most Google offices.

You work in IT and you've never heard of SAP?

That's pretty wild, like not knowing who Microsoft or IBM are.

I haven’t read of such things in my country but am hopeful that this will happen soon here in India.

TfL, BP, Shell etc run on SAP. Had good fun messing around with SAP over there

I clicked on the link not having heard of ERP or SAP and expecting to have my mind blown, too.

But, isn't that software almost the reason why computers and databases and programming happened? To help businesses with there boring business stuff, like inventory and orders and accounting?

This is kind of how I felt when I started to learn Haskell

It's like Salesforce, that crap is ubiquitous in large companies. Have you ever used it? It's a nightmarishly clunky piece of trash and yet Salesforce is a 150B behemoth.

Why would you use ERP instead of a regular SQL database?

edit Got a lot of vote downs. This was a genuine question from someone completely ignorant on what ERP is. Not trying to say that SQL is better, but I'm asking this because I'm ignorant of what ERP is and the description makes it appear as if it's a database.

What's the difference? would be better wording I guess.

Good software is a force multiplier than enables everything else to be more effective.

A traditional mindset applied to software results in the businesses we often see people complaining about. "We make the product but Sales gets all the money!" and that's very similar to your metallurgists. Code for hire as a product of labour. It takes an army of people to sell, to advertise, to make me want what it is you have (just like with music).

But a business who looks at software as complementary will see the value. A dollar spent brings many dollars back, just indirectly. It enhances the machinery that's already in place, and allows it to do entirely new things.

" people who write the software take home a large fraction of it. Maybe more than half, "

Where do you get that figure? The vast majority of people writing software are not paid enough salary + benefits to come anywhere close to 50% of the revenue their work is responsible for earning.

Musicians write music. Developers write and maintain software.

Imagine there's no Version, it's easy if you try...

Really, no concept of version: you buy a piece of software as it is, take it or leave it! Either it works enough for you or it doesn't. No bugfix in the next release because there is NO next release. The musician, ehm... developer, has switched to the new shiny thing. You modified yoour environment slightly and you need a tiny change on the software to adapt? Too bad it does not exist!

Really, the point I'm trying to make is that comparing software developers to musicians doesn't hold a lot of water. Both professions include creativity, but a song shipped is as immutable as a piece of hardware. Adaptabillity is what makes software as worth as it is!

Yes. The commodification of professional work is worth pointing out. I'm surprised by the percentage of people in this thread who think the SW industry is exceptional. It tells me a lot about the fictions people want to tell themselves in an industry that is still relatively novel.

By contrast I'm a HW builder (mechanical engineer / industrial designer / design manager). I make good comp but maybe 70% of what my similarly leveled colleagues in SW do. The vast majority of the arguments in here still apply to my work, with a little less focus on maintenance. And yet my job role's comp is in a slow decline. Why? Because it's fully commoditized.

Anecdote: I used to work for a HW focused VC leading their internal incubator/consultancy's physical design team. One of our ML focused investments got acquired for a ton of money and every other startup in the building wanted to know how well compensated the team was going to be. It's odd to see some people at the water cooler suddenly be worth millions when your startup is still grinding, it makes for stark contrast and a very real "what if" to the onlookers. One of the Sr MEs at a struggling startup was clearly jealous and lamented to me, "man, screw machine learning, how come nobody is paying me a million bucks for my work?" To which I said "let me ask you something, when you were studying mech-e in school, did you ever use steam tables?" yeah. "Did you learn about the Carnot cycle?" yeah. "Have you considered the fact that our industry is 200 years old? It stands to reason that our jobs are not hot shit anymore. Be glad you like your work and are still paid well; ignore the new kids if you can."

Metal economy is huge, but there are inputs. Software engineers have no inputs into our projects besides our work and some hardware and electricity. A developer is 99% of the cost of a piece of software.

What would cause it to not last outside of precedent? In all those cases, it sounds like middlemen exist that corner the end-market that you gotta go through to make big money. How would that even work with software in the age of the internet, open source, and commodity cloud infra?

Maybe that analogy would be accurate if you could make new and pleasing music out of hundreds of small samples of other music, and also 90% of the musicians were used to either getting their samples via torrent or picking one album and playing it in an orchestra of 5,000 for the next 40 years

> What's special about the software economy is that people who write the software take home a large fraction of it

I don't think this is true. Take all the non-tech companies that rely on software and hire tons of engineers, such as insurance and banking.

My hypothesis for why tech has high salaries is stock compensation and fast growth. For example, Google stock is nearly 2x what it was 3-4 years ago. If you have a four year grant and had about half your comp in stock, then 2xing the stock means you're making 50% more now, assuming you didn't get any promotions or anything. If you're trying to hire folks away from these situations, your pre-stock-growth starting offer has to compete with their post-stock-growth comp, so starting offers have pressure to grow over time.

Curious what fields return what fractions of benefits / value / profits to what participants, and how you'd measure and classify those.

There's SIC / NAICS / ISIC codes, or tier classifications, ranging from three (Qesnay) to five (Clark (1940), Hatt and Foote (1953), and Bell (1973)):

[A]n economy's major sectors, as delineated by Clark (1940), Hatt and Foote (1953), and Bell (1973), correspond to major stages in the essential life process. The primary sector -- agriculture, fishing, lumber, mining, oil and gas -- represents the extraction of matter from the environment to produce energy, including the calories to sustain individual organisms. The secondary sector -- processing primary goods, as in construction and manufacturing -- represents the synthesis of matter and energy into more organized forms (negentropy). The tertiary sector, including transportation and utilities, represents the infrastructure for distributing matter and energy about the system, while the quaternary sector -- trade, finance, insurance, and real estate -- constitutes a parallel infrastructure for the collection, processing, and distribution of information that is necessary in all living system for the control of material flows. Finally, the "highest" of all sectors in its remove from the physical environment is the quinary sector, including government, law, and education, representing the societal programming -- socialization, education, law making -- and collective or representative decision making to effect control.

-- James Beniger, *The Control Revolution,8 p. 179.

For participants, perhaps: unskilled labour, skilled labour, professionals, managers, finance, consumers?

And just because in other industries people are used to taking smaller portions of revenue they generated, doesn't mean that we should do same.

Also unlike in some creative industries, software engineers tend to have higher education and are better able to understand their economic contributions.

First of all, software is not a creative industry. Creatives always took home a small fraction for many obvious reasons.

Software solves hard problems it is constantly evolving and updating so you need lots of personnel to maintain it, with a lot of knowledge so it will never be cheap, and great engineers to create it in the first place.

Take away a bunch of artists nothing will change. Take away a bunch of critical software - the world will stop.

So no, it will last and it will last long, as the world becomes more and more technological.

It is unprecedented because software and computer world in general is a huge breakthrough and is only 30 years old. Music on the other hand is thousands of years.

> Musicians don't take home half of music revenue. In most creative industries, the creatives take home less than 1/10th.

Perhaps the difference is that musicians don't change a completed work. There is no maintenance cost. A song doesn't become useless and obsolete if you don't pay the musician to continually improve it.

For static software, I'd expect it to look more similar. How much of Tetris went to the people who wrote the software?

Most of the people writing software for the companies listed in this article are freelance workers in lower wage companies. They make close to, and sometimes less than minimum wage for high wage nations.

Startups pay well because speed is so important and faang pays well because their margins are enormous and the risk of those shrinking is worth paying top dollar for the absolute best talent in the world.

Lol, I agree that should be the real patio11 law

Or maybe a rule or such for general peeps that doesn't necessarily involve some special coffee-drinking in trendy Oregon? And what the heck is a "bed-and-breakfast type coffee tray"?

Or, Patio's Law, rephrsased: "Look at the very significant things you encounter with fresh eyes. You already know how to get to the crux of issues. When you get there, FRESH EYES!".

It reminds me of Hidden Champions.

>Hidden champions are relatively small but highly successful companies that are concealed behind a curtain of inconspicuousness, invisibility, and sometimes secrecy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions

We have an "internal systems" team at my current company to solve this problem. The product manager for the team knows everyone and keeps tabs on what's being done that could be automated. It's not used to replace people (at least it hasn't been yet) rather it's used to allow the team to stay the same size and scale up their operations to meeting the growing business demands.

I think many companies could benefit from a team like this.

I wrote a piece of code last year in probably no more than a few hours.Showed it to a few guys in my team.Instead of sharing my excitement,they were like "if you run this,what are we going to do then?". She was right,if I'd do it, the size of the team would be reduced by half.But then,what I'd get? Do I get a bonus the size of those employee's salary for 6 month? No.I'd get a grand or two and instead and a pat on a shoulder,while those guys won't find a job for momths.So what's the point?

I've seen this even at technology companies. It's like our devs hours are valuable so we can't invest them in something everyone is comfortable doing with a spreadsheet already.

We are always looking for ideas!

Can you give a few examples, please?

It wasn’t until I got a job in consulting and started traveling to what are often dismissed as the “fly-over states” that I got to see billion-dollar B2B businesses that were basically unheard of outside of their market. The B2B e-commerce market alone is over a trillion dollars.

There’s a lot of opportunities for ERP developers and other tech roles that don’t exist in SV.

I spoke to a guy recently who works for a company doing $300 million revenue/year as a wholesale distributor of internet networking equipment (think finger optic cables and equipment for housing them underground). Their customers are the ISPs.

The company is privately owned and not venture backed so you'll never hear of them unless you are in that business.

the types of opportunities that lead to SaaS businesses, are extroadinarily hard to find. I've gone to dozens of dozens of networking events and talked to dozens of people from a variety of industries. I've done informational interviews, etc. It's very difficult to find problems that don't have good enough solutions. Most of the time people are pretty happy to continue dealign with the problem the way they have been.

That might be just the entry point for me, since I'm having a hard time at landing my 1st job as junior. I feel like I'll have a good time and lots of fun anyways. Any advice on how to approach clients? (I can do (full-stack) web development and solve problems/ optimize solutions with algorithms and meta-heuristics.)

There is a huge amount of these $20 bills lying around in fact. The thing is they're not that easy to pick up. These ERP systems are often fairly bespoke, designed for the workflow and needs of specific industries, or even specific niches in industries.

I work for one of these bespoke ERP companies, our niche is CNC machine shops (huge industy you don't hear much about). Our software was grown organically out of tools we made to manage our own CNC shop, spun out into its own company. That deep domain knowledge is what allows us to make a competitive product.

If this kind of stuff interests you we're hiring: https://www.proshoperp.com/company/careers/

> This thread seems to suggest that there are heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the world and accessible to any software engineer.

I argue that they are. It is just that the dollar bills are stuck in the mud or hidden under a leaf or just down paths you rarely take.

The bottleneck is knowing about them. You need to be the kind of person who thinks everything is done poorly and then thinks of ways to do it better.

The other bottleneck is that extracting them frequently requires annoying human interaction, but if you are willing to do it endlessly, there is plenty to do. I'm not and I lose out on a lot of projects as I don't want to do that.

But I know some absolutely terrible software developers (i.e. expect to see your password in the source code kind of developer) who outearn most devs I know simply by selling vast amounts of solutions to the thousands of people they meet every year.

Spend the day talking to random shop owners. Spend the night hacking together a fix for them. Collect an ongoing fee.

Engineers are unaware of the needs of these businesses, and often, the businesses are unaware that it's possible to solve some of their problems with software. That's why successful engineer-founders often have prior industry experience, or a co-founder who is an expert in the given industry.

I remember working on a construction survey crew in high school, where all survey measurements were recorded by hand in notebooks, and then manually transferred to Excel to perform some trivial operations. The office had hundreds of notebooks lying around. The leadership had no idea it was possible to have an application built to solve something like this. Perhaps they're using something now — I sure hope so.

Maybe it's also because some software sounds dull and old fashioned so people don't talk much about it.

I am into ERP, WMS, TMS and BI software. You don't hear much about this on HN but worldwide it's huge because it is what logistics run on.

Most of the time it's also old software and I believe there is a lot of money to be made. For example machine learning can be used to estimate goods that have to be purchased to keep optimal stock.

For software people, the missing link is knowledge of a domain. Not domain expertise, the rare part is merely knowing that domains even exist to be searched for $20 bills.

The article mentions actuarial software for funeral homes. In retrospect, of course that's a thing, but asked to name low-hanging domains for lifestyle software businesses, few of us would ever arrive at that answer, let alone in the first 500 guesses. And is it sexy enough that we'd stake our livelihood on it?

I'm reminded of this XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1425/

People in these small niches can't easily tell the difference between things that are too hard to be worth the money vs things that are solved by a for loop in an afternoon, and they don't talk about their work in a way that makes it obvious that there's gold in the hills.

This is one reason that user research is an entire field that gets paid almost like engineering: framing the problem can be just as hard as the problem itself.

Software engineering skills alone are definitely not enough.

There are a ton of these heaps of bills, sure, but they aren't lying around on the floor so much as on hilltops and mountains, to abuse an analogy.

It may help to think of these opportunities as a form of technology arbitrage. In order to take advantage, one or more people have to a) understand the technology, b) understand the problem domain c) understand the workflows and d) identify and communicate effectively to the people who can actually make the decisions.

How many people do you know who are both competent and interested in all of these aspects? It's not that any of these skills are particularly rare, but they are rare in the same person and there aren't natural communities, for the most part, of people who can do all aspects.

Another issue is sometimes (often, really) the technology aspect is the smallest and least interesting part of the problem.

To me it seems that large parts of 'average' office jobs are things that a software developer would automate so they took a tenth of the time. Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V and undo are advanced computing to many people.

But of course, the people doing those jobs aren't going to go out of their way to make 90% of their job redundant.

A lot of it is developers not understanding, being aware of (or simply being uninterested in) the problems other businesses face.

And businesses not knowing what _can_ be done with software to commission developers to solve it for them (or if they do, the lack of empathy from the developer ends up with them building a half-assed solution).

The ones I've seen are a right-place-right-time kind of things. One company I saw scanned and collected auto parts instructions to be searchable via a web UI. I'm not going to come up with that out of the blue. These people are close to a problem and figured out an automation step that adds a lot of value.

Personally the biggest difficulty I have had is getting ops people to change their habits. Software is only useful if people use it and retrofitting software onto existing processes is infinitely more challenging than building a software driven company from the ground up.

>> "heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the place" This isn't the case from my experience. I've networked with and interviewed dozens of people. It's incredibly difficult to find worthwhile problems that can be automated and aren't already automated. And, even here in the bay area, people tend to react pretty negatively the moment you even mention "repetitive processes". No one likes automation: they associate it with getting fired. So, if you ask people about this, they tend to clam up and stop talking pretty quickly.

And when you get right down to it, and start having the type of deep dive talks need to have with potential customers, you'll quickly discover there's already solutions to almost every conceivable problem out there, even in the some of the most esoteric fields you can imagine.

It's sales and marketing.

There are tons of things that are worth the time to automate but aren't because they aren't worth the additional cost to sell the automation.

Just because something can be done automatically doesn't mean companies can magically discover it and pay for it. You still have to sell it to them.

I have learned to avoid companies that don´t understand that they are a software/technology company. You can't scale up if don't automate. IMO, It is just an excuse to do mediocre technical work.

What do you manufacture?

What kind of manufacturing applications does IT manage?