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"Neither such coders nor their managers are as in touch with the particular culture and mores of the aviation world as much as the people who are down on the fa
by _bxg1 8y ago
"Neither such coders nor their managers are as in touch with the particular culture and mores of the aviation world as much as the people who are down on the factory floor, riveting wings on, designing control yokes, and fitting landing gears. Those people have decades of institutional memory about what has worked in the past and what has not worked. Software people do not."
I wonder if, once basic programming becomes a part of standard education, these kinds of problems will be mitigated. Right now if you're a developer, you're not anything else. So developers come in as outsiders to any given industry and have to learn about it. But software is applicable to nearly every industry, so we end up with lots of domain-specific code written by people who don't know those domains very well. What if the domain experts could not only speak the language of code, but could do some of the coding themselves?
- Sharlin 8y ago> What if the domain experts could not only speak the language of code, but could do some of the coding themselves? Some can, especially in the academia. It… sort of works but is certainly not optimal. The truth is, it is not enough to be a coder who knows something about the domain, and neither is it enough to be a domain expert who can code. You have to be an expert at both, like the author of TFA. Or at the very least, your team has to be.
- _bxg1 8y agoCould there not be domain experts who know how to express their general ideas in terms of code (pseudocode, even), paired with coding experts who can architect the overall software system? You'd still need software experts, but you wouldn't have just software experts.
- Sharlin 8y agoYes, as I said: teams are a superorganism, a force multiplier. But a team of coders isn't enough, you need a close-knit team of people with diverse areas of expertise, and those people need to be great at communicating.
- linuxftw 8y agoThat would be an overworked engineer IMO. Should the engineer that designs the air frame go weld it together? One issue, if the system resetting and no honoring the maximum authority to do so would not have been caught by a half-software engineer. That's definitely something the software team should have caught if there was any amount of reasonable QA involved. It's clear to me Boeing doesn't employ capable people on the software side.
- tonyarkles 8y agoNot necessarily go weld it together, but they should be going and spending time with the welders. Ben Rich’s memoirs from the Skunkworks talks about this a fair bit. Around there, having the engineers close to the fabricators was one of their central tenets, and the engineers did occasionally roll up their sleeves in the shop. With the SR71, at one point when they were fighting with a nasty engine problem, Ben himself was going to go up on a flight so that the pilot could show him what was happening.
- linuxftw 8y agoI agree, they should work as closely together as possible. But it's still a team effort, not one person involved in large aspects of the process by themselves.
- hinkley 8y agoI’m attacking this problem from the other side. I reject the notion that one must become a monk to be a programmer. There’s a happy medium between cave troll and brogrammer to be found. As developers we should have more hobbies. We should find the technical aspects of those hobbies, and we should be able to walk into a company serving that community and serve as a backup SME from day one. If Software Is Going to Eat the World, that is how it will be. Not from a bunch of smart stupid people “disrupting” industries they know nothing about. There’s long tail of subject matters without a lot of money that could still use software. Getting software to them is going to take cheaper labor, like 2-person teams or possibly volunteer work.