She is spending her own money and her rich friend's money to give her team a good salary and a chill work environment. I don't see a problem with that.
Workout tracking is a fun project. It's relatively simple in scope and you can customize it for an audience of 1 -- I did something similar to brush up on RN development:
There is a difference between "table-stakes" complexity and premature complexity. I'd argue that a simple but sane CI / deployment pipeline takes relatively little work to set up and falls under "table-stakes" in that even a pre-pmf team will have a positive ROI in doing it.
On the flip side I have been the one working long nights and weekends reverse engineering code by engineers who prematurely built complexity into the system because they wanted to add a GraphQL api in addition to a rest API. All while in the pre-pmf days, with no value-add to the features that ultimately DID find pmf.
I do generally believe that cleaning-up after the pmf-hunting phase is itself a privilege that many startups do not get to experience, and should be treated as such. I understood the author as arguing that we shouldn't chase shiny things and should ruthlessly avoid complexity in favor of finding pmf. This philosophy is clearly illustrated in the devtools startup he is running. I thought there were some cool ideas there.
I simply reject the premise that all problems a startup needs to solve are original problems. Your customers have lots of ordinary problems too, as do you. Sure, you can't justify spending months on building some custom GraphQL infrastructure or the perfect CI/CD deployment system, but your customers do care about things like "when I download and install this software it's not a corrupt build" and "the software's updater works" and "when I pay these people money for their software I get what I paid for and don't get double-billed". These are all unoriginal problems that are nontrivial - ideally your startup solves them with off-the-shelf solutions to save time, but you still spend engineer hours integrating those solutions.
The question I ask myself: Is there a large and still-unmet demand for software engineering worldwide. AKA is the market supply-constrained by a large-enough amount?
If so, I imagine engineers will be more productive with AI (and wages will go down, or at least stop growing somewhat), but the demand for software engineers will stay strong.
If not, then engineers being more productive would mean fewer engineers can meet the global demand for software engineering work and I would expect to see the demand for software engineers reduced.
Development has gotten much faster since the 2000s: better languages, better IDEs, better libraries, better design practices, better documentation, better online resources, better (faster, less buggy) target platforms. I remember when I was first writing code in the early 2010s writing Objective-C in Xcode 3 with manual memory management. Developer productivity has exploded more than most people realize.
And yet developers have always been in demand. We just have a lot more programs now, and a lot of very-similar and/or niche programs. All the random libraries on npm, Rust, Haskell, etc. the various crypto-currencies, static/dynamic webpage builders, 3 separate JavaScript runtimes. People start businesses and actually get funding for these libraries. And it seems like a lot of companies want almost the exact same product, some "business solution" or "cloud solution", but they have specific reasons existing solutions aren't acceptable (performance? security? some feature?), so they pay $200k+ salaries for developers to build them.
But will this always be the case? Even ignoring GPT4, we don't really need these developers who are working on niche and similar projects; we are having a harder time getting hired right now with the economic downturn. And still, it's entirely possible this growth has a limit, and GPT4 will make developers turn ideas into working products faster than people can come up with them.
I don’t think this is the full explanation (or even the biggest factor). I have lived in foreign cities with FAR more income inequality than sf, and I never saw the blatant crime I see in sf. It’s to the point where seeing live shoplifting or robbery isn’t even a surprising or notable occurrence for most people. There is simply no will to enforce the law.
I can assure you, the people who are robbing electronics stores are not the ones serving lattes or driving ubers. SF has a huge issue with career criminals. And it’s easy to be one. I have never seen such blatant drug dealing and robbery in my life, and I have lived in supposedly “dangerous” cities outside of the US.
I am sure that’s part of it. Minimum wage jobs are hard. But there are plenty of people who work hard jobs or come from hard situations without turning to crime. Sf does it’s best to make crime and drugs an appealing option when the law isn’t enforced.
I went to hear Jacques Cousteau speak at UCLA in about 1975 and he was predicting that the oceans would be dead in 25 years. Somewhat alarmist, I suppose -- but maybe we all did some things to avert it. Sort of like Jonah preaching to Ninevah.
This is a pervasive myth. Young founders get pr because it’s notable and drives clicks, but the average age of a successful founder is older. The average age of a YC founder is 30. According to a Harvard Business Review article I remember reading, the average age is 45.
Unfortunately “protecting ourselves” against these drugs has terrible second-order effects (see war on drugs). Perhaps we should let people buy drugs and bad food but add taxes to cover the collective damage done by them.
