I also think the opportunity to build small but helpful gadgets is bigger than finding the perfect SaaS idea. But it’s still not exactly easy to come up with something new. Whenever I see an ingenius product I think to myself „This was obvious, why haven’t I thought of that?“, but oh well.
Imagine investing the FAANG money into dividend ETFs and living off those in a few years.
> that FAANG employment seems a tad risky these days with layoffs
You aren’t seriously comparing the risk of self-employment to the risk of being layed off by one of the most stable companies of the world during a downturn after a 15 year bullrun, are you?
> If anything, it feels like the vast majority of the business world is still operating on some combination of Excel and a software program that was outdated a decade ago.
Which just proves the immense value of Excel and the relatively bad value proposition of custom-made software.
> The main issue is that their problems are too boring and obscure for anyone without direct personal experience to care about them.
1. Yes, which is why it’s increasingly hard to start a business as a pure software engineer. To put it harshly, most software engineers don’t know enough about the real world out there to solve its problems. Many choose to create software for other software engineers for this reason, and that market is fierce.
2. Another issue is that only those specific businesses might have those problems. Even if you know about them, solving them might not be a good business case. Solving them must be lucrative enough to allow for a small target audience, or the problem needs to be common enough to allow for economies of scale, which brings us to back to point 1.
> It's interesting how so many people have an aversion to being a business owner / entrepreneur
It’s not like nobody wants that, the scarce thing is having a good business idea unless you want to go into consulting.
> And the ceiling is limited as an employee, whereas it's virtually unlimited as a business owner.
That’s kinda stretching it. Higher FAANG-level salaries are enough to reach financial independence, which is pretty much „unlimited“ territory for most normal people. On the other hand, most businesses are not hyper successful. It‘s not like becoming a millionaire entrepreneur can be taken for granted.
It’s interesting that you don’t seem to understand this. Survivorship bias or something else?
That‘s literally an example of the decision depending on multiple factors. Separation of concerns -> more isolation -> stronger security of the overall system is exactly one of the possible benefits of microservices.
Scale is just one. There is also fault tolerance, security, organizational separation (which can be, up to a point, also be realized with libraries as you suggest), bigger ecosystem to choose from, …
>My favourite thing about microservice architecture is how simple individual microservices are to understand and contribute to.
I generally agree with your stance and I would add that I find the whole simplistic „microservices suck“ talking point as nonsensical as viewing them as a panacea. They do solve a few specific (for most companies, mostly organizational/human factors because scale and redundancy don’t matter that much) problems that are harder to solve with monoliths.
I still think this point is a bit misleading, because yes, the components become simpler, but their interaction becomes more complex and that complexity is now less apparent. See:
>The architecture and provisioning of microservices can be more complicated, but from the perspective of a developer working on a microservice it should be much simpler to work on compared to a monolith.
I think that perspective often doesn’t match reality. Maybe most microservice domains I‘ve seen had poorly separated domains, but changes small enough to ignore the interactions with other services have been rare in my experience.
