high quality carpentry has a market of people who buy one off projects for lots of money.

There is not really a similar market in software.

I'm not saying there won't be fine programmers etc. but with woodworking I can see how a market exists that will support you developing your skills and I don't see it with software and thus the path seems much less clear to me.

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CuriouslyC 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Bro, there is a HUGE market for one off software projects for lots of money.

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bryanrasmussen 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

yeah sorry I've seen one off carpentry projects for lots of money and I've worked on software projects for individual companies, and it's not really comparable (especially going back to the earlier post that started this, which I thought was not discussing say the newest spotify competitor or something similar)

however I suppose at the point where I need to explain that and all the ways in which the two things are dissimilar it becomes a book in itself.

	▲	phil21 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We are all talking about exceptions to the exception at this point. It's typically uninteresting to discuss... But at the risk of being uninteresting, I know of incredibly niche software projects that were done for a single rich benefactor as one-offs simply for their personal use-case and no one else. Years in the making and quite well paid. In one case effectively lifetime employment for the sole developer. They are obviously incredibly rare, but they do exist. However, they are totally irrelevant to discuss in this context since it's a rounding error of 1% of 1% of current developers who would get such roles either via luck or skill.

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operatingthetan 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I've been involved in building a multitude of saas apps and very few of them had any unique functionality. I'm not sure many of those companies cared about the uniqueness of their code.

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ryoshu 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

SAP or Salesforce can do anything. Or you can write custom code for a fraction of the price for small/medium sized businesses.

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suddenlybananas 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Obviously, they care about the uniqueness of the code if they are one-offs.

	▲	operatingthetan 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My thought is that many of them thought their products were one-offs but were actually not in practice.