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I'm not entirely sure that she's right in tarring the whole industry with the same brush. Taking a bug out to tea is fantastic, because it really is about unde

I'm not entirely sure that she's right in tarring the whole industry with the same brush. Taking a bug out to tea is fantastic, because it really is about understanding the problem. But she conflates maintenance coding and program writing. There is a lot of half-baked software out there, but to say that this isn't like any other industry - like journalism - is really patently absurd. Despite best intentions, journalism is absolutely like programming. A sub-editor is really just like your QA department in many ways. And just like she made a mistake in a script on NPR unintentionally, so too do programmers. This piece is really a mass of contradictions. Take the following: But here’s the thing. No one will ever remember that number. No one remembers it now, and I’m sure no one noticed it when it happened. But I knew it happened, that it was an easily preventable mistake, and, in journalism, being wrong in that way is absolutely unacceptable. So... what is it? Was it unacceptable that the figure got into the story to the extent that she got fired? No, of course not - I'm assuming NPR ran a correction, and forgave her for her mistake. I really doubt most programmers are going out of their way to slap together code that has deliberate bugs. Yeah, they exist but to say any software development house that writes email clients, job seeking sites or any other software are intentionally encouraging this sort of behaviour seems to be an insult to the vast majority of founders and software developers who work hard to hone their craft and take care to produce quality software. This essay seems overly emotionally wrought and with a perspective that is out of kilter with reality. For me, despite her protestations that she is no better than all the others who work at software development, there's an implicit undertone of superiority masked by claims of victimisation and isolation. It's not particularly fair, and it seems rather manipulative to me.

dcole2929 10y ago
I think the difference is in how the two industries she are comparing here fundamentally treat mistakes. In journalism, you might not get fired immediately for a mistake like that but certainly you're going to get reprimanded and told how unacceptable that is. Your company is absolutely going to run a correction at the first opportunity they get. Any mistake is treated as a major embarrassment by staff of a respectable news company. The viewers/readers might not notice/care but the company does. This is totally not how things work in tech though. First of all there are a lot more mistakes/bugs, and because of that how bugs are handled is completely different. If you're not doing something where lives/money are at stake, it's ok to release with bugs so long as they aren't showstoppers. When I write something that has a bug in it, I don't even get talked to. We just write it up and toss it in the list with all the other bugs. There are of course situations in both industries where things are different but I think in general there is definitely a major difference in how tech treats mistakes as compare to how pretty much every other industry.
- chris_wot 10y ago
  A bit hard to respond at the moment, I've been rate limited!
- chongli 10y ago
  You should try reading science journalism. It's absolutely riddled with errors and oversimplifications that never get corrected! Moreover, sure NPR might fire you for repeatedly using incorrect numbers for which they then have to publish retractions but that doesn't stop you from using essentially correct statistics in highly misleading ways, a sin all major media sources are guilty of.

dcole2929 10y ago

I think the difference is in how the two industries she are comparing here fundamentally treat mistakes. In journalism, you might not get fired immediately for a mistake like that but certainly you're going to get reprimanded and told how unacceptable that is. Your company is absolutely going to run a correction at the first opportunity they get. Any mistake is treated as a major embarrassment by staff of a respectable news company. The viewers/readers might not notice/care but the company does. This is totally not how things work in tech though. First of all there are a lot more mistakes/bugs, and because of that how bugs are handled is completely different. If you're not doing something where lives/money are at stake, it's ok to release with bugs so long as they aren't showstoppers. When I write something that has a bug in it, I don't even get talked to. We just write it up and toss it in the list with all the other bugs. There are of course situations in both industries where things are different but I think in general there is definitely a major difference in how tech treats mistakes as compare to how pretty much every other industry.

chris_wot 10y ago
A bit hard to respond at the moment, I've been rate limited!
chongli 10y ago
You should try reading science journalism. It's absolutely riddled with errors and oversimplifications that never get corrected! Moreover, sure NPR might fire you for repeatedly using incorrect numbers for which they then have to publish retractions but that doesn't stop you from using essentially correct statistics in highly misleading ways, a sin all major media sources are guilty of.