4 ms·

Software-as-art has lost a lot of ground to software-as-business, and in software-as-business, somewhere up the chain there is a management-level individual who

Software-as-art has lost a lot of ground to software-as-business, and in software-as-business, somewhere up the chain there is a management-level individual who isn't really sure how to measure either progress or code quality. There are myriad tools designed for these people though, and they all chose the simplest (and wrong) solutions to the problem: progress is SLOC added and bug reports clsoed per day. The height of the software-as-art era was the shareware days of the late 90s. Development certainly moved a lot more slowly overall, but there also tended to be better relationships between developers and their users and developers were not yet all working for people who tried to measure their progress by the only metrics they could understand. The entire industry has been a victim of Goodhart's Law.

jamesb93 7y ago
Do you have any suggested reading around software as art vs business? You pretty much began to articulate the things I've been thinking about lately.
- thaumaturgy 7y ago
  I wish! If there's a good book out about it, I'd love a recommendation too. I lived it though, writing my first "software" as a youth in the mid-80s. I've seen a lot of change in computing. And not all "get off my lawn" bad, just different. I see software now as having three different faces: software-as-art, software-as-business, and software-as-engineering. The 80s and 90s had a lot of activity in software-as-art. I was mostly following Mac culture at the time, so I saw this through Bungie, Ambrosia, BareBones, and hundreds of smaller indie developers. The environment at the time enforced the software-as-art discipline, because downloading a program happened over 14.4kbps or slower, or 28.8kbps if your parents had good jobs, and came along with yelling that often sounded like, "get off the phone!" "But I'm downloading!" Installation media was 700K or 1.4MB, and that had to have all your code, art, sound, and other resources. That's mostly all gone now. Bungie of course got married to Microsoft, which pissed off Mac enthusiasts way more than when Jobs announced a partnership with MS to get Office on the Mac. They've done well. Panic are the only old-school indie commercial desktop software developers I can think of off the top of my head that are still pretty true to their roots. A lot of software of course just became free. I enjoy so much more high quality software at no cost now, which is really only possible because of the massive benefits of scale that have come from all the tools that have trickled down from software-as-business. Software-as-business really took off. Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle and others were always kinda big, but not the impossibly large megacorps that they are now. Most of them were still vulnerable to serious mistakes, and that was good, because it meant the users still had some power. Now, mistakes in software development don't really matter to these companies unless they impact 8 figures of quarterly revenue, and that's a process that has zero room for software-as-art. Software-as-engineering is mostly stillborn, languishing in academia or a few places with rigorous standards (like NASA) or still finding its footing in modern DevOps. I still hold out hope that eventually this aspect will get some love too. I think it will be necessary, eventually, but maybe not until after I've written my last line of code.
- openfuture 7y ago
  Masters of Doom about John Carmack and John Romero is in big part about the shareware days and the art vs business of programming.
PavlovsCat 7y ago
> there also tended to be better relationships between developers and their users and developers Besides postcardware ("if you like the program, send me a postcard"), I have to think of Phone Me NOW!!!: http://www.apollo-core.com/bringup/v3003_x15_SysInfo.jpg http://www.apollo-core.com/bringup/v3003_x15_SysInfo.jpg
icebraining 7y ago
> There are myriad tools designed for these people though, and they all chose the simplest (and wrong) solutions to the problem: progress is SLOC added and bug reports clsoed per day. Is the SLOC counting still a thing nowadays, though? I've worked at companies ranging from 4-person startups to an old worldwide behemoth (all in the EU, though) and nobody even tracked SLOC, let alone evaluate developers on that; all the dumb metrics came from the issue tracker. Though I have the impression your real evaluation is based on how well you work with others, assuming you clear a low technical competence bar.

jamesb93 7y ago

Do you have any suggested reading around software as art vs business? You pretty much began to articulate the things I've been thinking about lately.

thaumaturgy 7y ago
I wish! If there's a good book out about it, I'd love a recommendation too. I lived it though, writing my first "software" as a youth in the mid-80s. I've seen a lot of change in computing. And not all "get off my lawn" bad, just different. I see software now as having three different faces: software-as-art, software-as-business, and software-as-engineering. The 80s and 90s had a lot of activity in software-as-art. I was mostly following Mac culture at the time, so I saw this through Bungie, Ambrosia, BareBones, and hundreds of smaller indie developers. The environment at the time enforced the software-as-art discipline, because downloading a program happened over 14.4kbps or slower, or 28.8kbps if your parents had good jobs, and came along with yelling that often sounded like, "get off the phone!" "But I'm downloading!" Installation media was 700K or 1.4MB, and that had to have all your code, art, sound, and other resources. That's mostly all gone now. Bungie of course got married to Microsoft, which pissed off Mac enthusiasts way more than when Jobs announced a partnership with MS to get Office on the Mac. They've done well. Panic are the only old-school indie commercial desktop software developers I can think of off the top of my head that are still pretty true to their roots. A lot of software of course just became free. I enjoy so much more high quality software at no cost now, which is really only possible because of the massive benefits of scale that have come from all the tools that have trickled down from software-as-business. Software-as-business really took off. Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle and others were always kinda big, but not the impossibly large megacorps that they are now. Most of them were still vulnerable to serious mistakes, and that was good, because it meant the users still had some power. Now, mistakes in software development don't really matter to these companies unless they impact 8 figures of quarterly revenue, and that's a process that has zero room for software-as-art. Software-as-engineering is mostly stillborn, languishing in academia or a few places with rigorous standards (like NASA) or still finding its footing in modern DevOps. I still hold out hope that eventually this aspect will get some love too. I think it will be necessary, eventually, but maybe not until after I've written my last line of code.
openfuture 7y ago
Masters of Doom about John Carmack and John Romero is in big part about the shareware days and the art vs business of programming.

PavlovsCat 7y ago

> there also tended to be better relationships between developers and their users and developers Besides postcardware ("if you like the program, send me a postcard"), I have to think of Phone Me NOW!!!: http://www.apollo-core.com/bringup/v3003_x15_SysInfo.jpg http://www.apollo-core.com/bringup/v3003_x15_SysInfo.jpg

icebraining 7y ago

> There are myriad tools designed for these people though, and they all chose the simplest (and wrong) solutions to the problem: progress is SLOC added and bug reports clsoed per day. Is the SLOC counting still a thing nowadays, though? I've worked at companies ranging from 4-person startups to an old worldwide behemoth (all in the EU, though) and nobody even tracked SLOC, let alone evaluate developers on that; all the dumb metrics came from the issue tracker. Though I have the impression your real evaluation is based on how well you work with others, assuming you clear a low technical competence bar.