3 ms·

And in the interim, let’s do everything we can to finally start to fix traditional programming. It is not a quixotic dream; it actually is possible. Once we jus

And in the interim, let’s do everything we can to finally start to fix traditional programming. It is not a quixotic dream; it actually is possible. Once we just accept that, everything can, and I believe will, be better. This is literally magical thinking. Formally verifying software, being disciplined about not adding unnecessary features, favoring simplicity over sophistication, using the tried and true instead of The New New Thing: all of these require a huge amount of willpower and fighting against the entire grain of the tech culture. You will be branded a reactionary. You will be told you are stuck in the past. The person willing to promise marketing the moon will be promoted, you will be labeled "difficult to work with." It's pretty black pill, but, as with our government: we are getting the software we deserve, good and hard.

jacquesm 10y ago
Think of it as an opportunity. There is an insane amount of money to be made rescuing crashed projects built by people that were too focused on using the latest and the greatest tech rather than actually focusing on delivering what the customer asked, on time and within the alloted budget. And by the time the project has crashed those promising marketing the moon will be fired, and you'll be labeled 'the guy/gal that saved the project'. It's a pretty easy sell at that point, assuming the company survived the carnage.
- hinkley 10y ago
  You will still run into a lot of sunk cost thinking, and they will assume often that you will deliver everything the charlatans promised them. Often it's the requirements that are the big part of the problem. Requests that defy physics aren't unheard of. Often the customer grasp how hard it is to change decisions in the structure after the fact. And what they have learned from this is to demand that everything in the system be "flexible". Which is how the giant white tower over engineered fiasco that preceded your arrival happened in the first place. Infinitely flexible software requires infinite test infrastructure. Nobody teaches that, and many don't even recognize when it's happening to them. My observations suggest that most don't learn from the mistake. they blame the failure on the preventable mistakes in execution they imagine were under their control and they just try harder the next time.
nxc18 10y ago
It sounds like wherever you work/live there is a pretty toxic dev culture. Software development is primarily about managing complexity. Think about the mountain of abstraction after abstraction between your "new new thing" angular 2.0/react app and the machine instructions that are being executed in hardware. A huge amount of software work is done just to make your life as a developer simpler. Its crazy that so many willfully make their software more complex than it needs to be. Not adding unnecessary features is always a no-brainer. Do you really have time to waste building something no one will use? A good product person can help teams with less experienced engineers avoid building the most technically challenging feature that happens to be useless.

jacquesm 10y ago

Think of it as an opportunity. There is an insane amount of money to be made rescuing crashed projects built by people that were too focused on using the latest and the greatest tech rather than actually focusing on delivering what the customer asked, on time and within the alloted budget. And by the time the project has crashed those promising marketing the moon will be fired, and you'll be labeled 'the guy/gal that saved the project'. It's a pretty easy sell at that point, assuming the company survived the carnage.

hinkley 10y ago
You will still run into a lot of sunk cost thinking, and they will assume often that you will deliver everything the charlatans promised them. Often it's the requirements that are the big part of the problem. Requests that defy physics aren't unheard of. Often the customer grasp how hard it is to change decisions in the structure after the fact. And what they have learned from this is to demand that everything in the system be "flexible". Which is how the giant white tower over engineered fiasco that preceded your arrival happened in the first place. Infinitely flexible software requires infinite test infrastructure. Nobody teaches that, and many don't even recognize when it's happening to them. My observations suggest that most don't learn from the mistake. they blame the failure on the preventable mistakes in execution they imagine were under their control and they just try harder the next time.

nxc18 10y ago

It sounds like wherever you work/live there is a pretty toxic dev culture. Software development is primarily about managing complexity. Think about the mountain of abstraction after abstraction between your "new new thing" angular 2.0/react app and the machine instructions that are being executed in hardware. A huge amount of software work is done just to make your life as a developer simpler. Its crazy that so many willfully make their software more complex than it needs to be. Not adding unnecessary features is always a no-brainer. Do you really have time to waste building something no one will use? A good product person can help teams with less experienced engineers avoid building the most technically challenging feature that happens to be useless.