It'd be pretty sick if the relevant discipline / sector / market of every single career path I embark upon, didn't summarily shit itself as soon as I begin making costly and irreversible personal investments therein.
Tradesman here… This is very nice. Good looking .pdf's, lots of templates…
I'm trying not to be negative, because this is a very nice platform… But, who is it for? The smaller shops will do most of this by hand, even still. The larger shops will have these features integrated into a management software ecosystem.
Tradesmen will take the path of least possible resistance to their objective. Unlike the IT/IS crowd… downloading (and/or integrating into our work-flow, in the case of an online service) yet another library/program/engine is usually one of the last solutions we'll go after.
Again, this is very nice software, but… I don't see too many of us using it.
Especially whereas one of the big selling points, is the library of templates… but, a plumber is never going to need an electrician's template… I say, don't bother going after tradesmen. Pimp this out to other software vendors. I don't know that ecosystem very well, at all, but I imagine that .pdf aaS will find a wider market with them as a plug-in of sorts, than with the operative crowd.
Not that you asked… But I would be happy with a junior position writing production C or ASM - but I assume that those sorts of positions are on the other end of the same boat. Who the hell has any use for an amateur dev. with an autistic fascination and _zero_ practical experience?
Someone here shared an article here, recently, espousing something along the lines of "home garden programming." I see software development moving in this direction, just like machining did: Either in a space-age shop, that looks more like a lab, with a fix-axis "machining center," or in the garage with Grandpappy's clapped out Atlas - and nothing in between.
Universities produce research, and students; Students produce industry, and the body politic; Industry and polity produce university funding.
A cycle I like to call, the "ring-bugger."
I'm not saying it's right, or acceptable, or particularly moral… But I agree that by obscuring the facts, we only serve to confound the decent and good-willed of our students.
As a non-member of the exalted-many who get to hack for a living-
I agree. The nature of the machine, is to crush the artisanry and joy from the task. However, you can't beat it, so…
I use the miserable things as "research accelerators." I have neither the time, nor the capacity to sustain the BAC necessary, to parse all of the sources and documentation of the various systems in which I'm liable to take interest. I very rarely ask them to "do ${task} for me," but rather:
"What is the modern approach to ${task}? And, how do I avoid that and do ${task} in the spirit of Unix?”
"Has anyone already done ${task} well?"
"Are there any examples of people attempting ${task} and failing spectacularly?"
If you treat it like your boss, it'll act like your boss. If you treat it like your assistant, it'll act like your assistant.
Perhaps that's due to the nature of the method of execution? But I wouldn't run that…
edit: +possibly