I worked in a manufacturing company for a year. The rules are simple.
You get raw material in, you make something out of it, then you package it and then sell it.
That’s it. Once your raw material is converted into the product, there’s no going back. You gotta sell it or store it somewhere until it’s sold.
If it’s not sold, then you keep paying a cost for holding it.If it’s defective you can only trash it. (Unless it’s recyclable in some way)If you sell it, and it’s defective, you gotta take it back, bear the cost of transportation, and then trash it (‘cos you can’t fix it now anyways). And on top of that you now have a pissed customer to fix.
If it’s broken, it’s broken. There’s no patch update coming up.
This makes me appreciate the industry I am in right now. Shipping software is way, way more flexible than actual physical product.
While my intention is not to take anything away from writing software (it’s one of the most skillful things anyone can do), the part where shipping something out is so much easier is hard to ignore.
You can write, deploy and wait. And if something is broken, you can always go back and fix it later and redeploy.
You need only code once, use multiple times.
Multiple people can use it at the same time.
One fix applies to everyone who uses it.
I’v worked on several products. And numerous such side projects. Each side project I work on required minimal capital investment because someone else had built the infrastructure for me to work on top off.
AWS, Website templates, Analytics Tracking, Algolia searches, Social media management tools for promotion — it’s all there. There are really no excuses for anyone who wants to build software products or services.
Sure, it breaks down and requires a lot of maintenance as well. But software is a gift that keeps on giving.
