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Ask HN: Why almost no software works properly?

Hi there, I've just downloaded a pdf invoice that was broken from Vodafone. 5 seconds later I went to Godaddy's page where on the domain settings page I've grepped for "forwarding" and found nothing. A domain transfer failed and they told me on the phone to turn off forwarding first. Can of worms... Fast forward 20 seconds I had to log in with Lastpass, it succeeded, but I got an alert it failed. I (and probably everyone else) could go on for ages. Why is the state of our industry is in such a ridiculous shape?

enkiv2 8y ago
Capitalism transforms functionality from a cardinal concern (how much of the thing works, & how useful is it) to an ordinal one (which implementation is least-bad). Ordinal concerns are easily gamed: no matter how easy it might be to do something correctly, it's almost always easier to do it only slightly better than someone else (or to break somebody else's implementation so it's worse). Capitalism also moves much of the emphasis to the initial selection stage: if any kind of lock-in is in place (even sunk cost), most of what matters is the implementation somebody initially picks, not whether or not they ultimately regret their selection. So, rather than making a solution that is stable and reliable or one that has deep rich expressivity, the emphasis is on making a solution that looks good on a shallow basis. This kind of logic affects even folks who aren't getting paid for their work, because it's taken to be 'common sense' instead of a set of generally-undesirable side effects of a warped circumstance. Software for a general audience expresses this in a more extreme way than other fields because it's nearly immune to costs like materials & liability, and because regulation largely hasn't stepped in to limit the worst of its side effects. If you build a house, it has to stay standing for long enough to sell (which is a lot longer than most software operates as intended), and it needs to pass inspection in order to be saleable; failure on either of these fronts is a big deal, because no matter how little you pay for labor, houses cost a great deal in materials, most of which lose nearly all their value in salvage. Software is almost pure labor, and can scale to an absurd degree because of this. Unlike publishing, software really doesn't have strong traditions left over from when manufacture and distribution was substantially more expensive & so quality was more important. As a result, the software industry behaves less like publishing and more like futures trading (that other entirely-abstract profession where people who are good at numbers inflate and pop bubbles while living in houses they can't afford and driving up the city's rent).

enkiv2 8y ago

Capitalism transforms functionality from a cardinal concern (how much of the thing works, & how useful is it) to an ordinal one (which implementation is least-bad). Ordinal concerns are easily gamed: no matter how easy it might be to do something correctly, it's almost always easier to do it only slightly better than someone else (or to break somebody else's implementation so it's worse). Capitalism also moves much of the emphasis to the initial selection stage: if any kind of lock-in is in place (even sunk cost), most of what matters is the implementation somebody initially picks, not whether or not they ultimately regret their selection. So, rather than making a solution that is stable and reliable or one that has deep rich expressivity, the emphasis is on making a solution that looks good on a shallow basis. This kind of logic affects even folks who aren't getting paid for their work, because it's taken to be 'common sense' instead of a set of generally-undesirable side effects of a warped circumstance. Software for a general audience expresses this in a more extreme way than other fields because it's nearly immune to costs like materials & liability, and because regulation largely hasn't stepped in to limit the worst of its side effects. If you build a house, it has to stay standing for long enough to sell (which is a lot longer than most software operates as intended), and it needs to pass inspection in order to be saleable; failure on either of these fronts is a big deal, because no matter how little you pay for labor, houses cost a great deal in materials, most of which lose nearly all their value in salvage. Software is almost pure labor, and can scale to an absurd degree because of this. Unlike publishing, software really doesn't have strong traditions left over from when manufacture and distribution was substantially more expensive & so quality was more important. As a result, the software industry behaves less like publishing and more like futures trading (that other entirely-abstract profession where people who are good at numbers inflate and pop bubbles while living in houses they can't afford and driving up the city's rent).