Big Software Firm Bleg

I haven’t yet posted much on AI as Software. But now I’ll say more, as I want to ask a question.

Someday ems may replace humans in most jobs, and my first book talks about how that might change many things. But whether or not ems are the first kind of software to replace humans wholesale in jobs, eventually non-em software may plausibly do this. Such software would replace ems if ems came first, but if not then such software would directly replace humans.

Many people suggest, implicitly or explicitly, that non-em software that takes over most jobs will differ in big ways from the software that we’ve seen over the last seventy years. But they are rarely clear on what exact differences they foresee. So the plan of my project is to just assume our past software experience is a good guide to future software. That is, to predict the future, one may 1) assume current distributions of software features will continue, or 2) project past feature trends into future changes, or 3) combine past software feature correlations with other ways we expect the future to differ.

This effort may encourage others to better clarify how they think future software will differ, and help us to estimate the consequences of such assumptions. It may also help us to more directly understand a software-dominated future, if there are many ways that future software won’t greatly change.

Today, each industry makes a kind of stuff (product or service) we want, or a kind of stuff that helps other industries to make stuff. But while such industries are often dominated by a small number of firms, the economy as a whole is not so dominated. This is mainly because there are so many different industries, and firms suffer when they try to participate in too many industries. Will this lack of concentration continue into a software dominated future?

Today each industry gets a lot of help from humans, and each industry helps to train its humans to better help that industry. In addition, a few special industries, such as schooling and parenting, change humans in more general ways, to help better in a wide range of industries. In a software dominated future, humans are replaced by software, and the schooling and parenting industries are replaced by a general software industry. Industry-independent development of software would happen in the general software industry, while specific adaptations for particular industries would happen within those industries.

If so, the new degree of producer concentration depends on two key factors: what fraction of software development is general as opposed to industry-specific, and how concentrated is this general software industry. Regarding this second factor, it is noteworthy that we now see some pretty big players in the software industry, such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft. And so a key question is the source of this concentration. That is, what exactly are the key advantages of big firms in today’s software market?

There are many possibilities, including patent pools and network effects among customers of key products. Another possibility, however, is one where I expect many of my readers to have relevant personal experience: scale economies in software production. Hence this bleg – a blog post asking a question.

If you are an experienced software professional who has worked both at a big software firm and also in other places, my key question for you is: by how much was your productive efficiency as a software developer increased (or decreased) due to working at a big software firm?  That is, how much more could you get done there that wasn’t attributable to having a bigger budget to do more, or to paying more for better people, tools, or resources. Instead, I’m looking for the net increase (or decrease) in your output due to software tools, resources, security, oversight, rules, or collaborators that are more feasible and hence more common at larger firms. Ideally you answer will be in the form of a percentage, such as “I seem to be 10% more productive working at a big software firm.”

Added 3:45p: I meant “productivity” in the economic sense of the inputs required to produce a given output, holding constant the specific kind of output produced. So this kind of productivity should ignore the number of users of the software, and the revenue gained per user. But if big vs small firms tend to make different kinds of software, which have different costs to make, those differences should be taken into account. For example, one should correct for needing more man-hours to add a line of code in a larger system, or in a more secure or reliable system.