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Why do software engineers constantly try to project that they are a special snowflake of a profession? Would you accept such nonsense from your plumber, or you

Why do software engineers constantly try to project that they are a special snowflake of a profession? Would you accept such nonsense from your plumber, or your dentist, or your electrician? Software engineering is one of the most fundamental building blocks of modern civilization, and yet it continues to be so fragile because of this kind of cavalier attitude. Also, apologizing doesn't mean you have a moral failing. It means accepting at least partial responsibility, and being humble about it. Any good org knows that you don't just design your system with the hope that people won't screw up, you need to design it to work despite some amount of screwing up. But in either case, it is still both an individual and collective responsibility.

catmanjan 6y ago
I have never heard of a plumber, dentist or electrician apologizing for anything - unless you count court orders...
- kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  And yet my house has never caught fire due to a miswiring or got flooded due to a misplumbing but let me not even count the ways in which software has failed me. Maybe there's a reason you rarely hear one category apologizing and hear the other category coming up with excuses.
  - lvturner 6y ago
    Mine has - my plumber didn't apologise, but he did instruct me over the phone how to properly apply PTFE tape.
  - stanmancan 6y ago
    Plumbing and electrical doesn’t change all too often. Once you learn the ins and outs it doesn’t change much over your career. Not the case with software development.
    - karatestomp 6y ago
      And when they do change there are very straightforward guides to the changes, when and where you can/should/must use new materials, and so on.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      I know people who’ve programmed microcontrollers in C all their lives and still written bugs. It’s not like switching tooling once in a while is the source of bugs.
  - jsjw7sbw 6y ago
    Still you insure your house for those things though. I think you are comparing apples with oranges here.
  - erikbye 6y ago
    > but let me not even count the ways in which software has failed me. Failed you? This sounds either very entitled or sensational. Has software caused you major grief in any way financial or the loss of limbs or loved ones? While this happens, very few people are affected by bugs in such a way, at least confirmed.
    - Nicksil 6y ago
      >Failed you? This sounds either very entitled or sensational. Has software caused you major grief in any way financial or the loss of limbs or loved ones? While this happens, very few people are affected by bugs in such a way, at least confirmed. Many people have been significantly affected by software bugs. Therac-25[1] is one I constantly remind myself of; it killed 5 people. Here's a list for further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs I'm not sure what your definition of "very few people" is but we'd all do well to aim for 0 adversely-affected people as a result from using software we write. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
      - erikbye 6y ago
        Read my reply again, note especially the part "While this happens". Obviously I am acutely aware of what you are saying, no matter how many Wikipedia articles you link, so your comment is not only superfluous but also makes no sense, as I was asking OP if he was personally affected in such a way because he seemed bitter. Your reply does not answer this, and you should let him answer for himself. > I'm not sure what your definition of "very few people" I think my definition is about the same as every accepted definition of "very few", the number of people affected by such bugs falls within this definition, considering how many users software has. > Many people have been significantly affected by software bugs. Therac-25[1] is one I constantly remind myself of; it killed 5 people. 5 does not fit the definition many in anyone's book.
        a1369209993 6y ago
        > 5 does not fit the definition many in anyone's book. Well, IIRC, there's Watership Down, a literal book, but I assume you meant that figuratively.
  - traderjane 6y ago
    Plenty of people are hurt or killed through clerical errors by medical professionals, but you're not going to get anyone admitting that. Even for something simple, if you have any accusation to make in a medical context, it's probably time to evaluate your options and consider a new doctor, and only then make your accusation.
  - lukeschlather 6y ago
    The worst thing code I have written ever did was cause a small power outage. But that was a one-time thing, I haven't had the opportunity to write code that even could do that in years.
- old-engineer 6y ago
  There always will be good and bad craftsmen. I once overheard my electrician demanding the guy installing the alarm system to lay his cables properly.
- adrianmonk 6y ago
  This is about the dynamic between people within the organization (coworkers, boss, etc.), not about external communication to customers. That is, we aren't talking about whether an individual software engineer should apologize to the customer or the end user. So the analogous question would be whether someone who has worked as a plumber has ever heard a coworker plumber apologize for messing up a job. I'm hoping the answer to that is yes. A plumber apologizing directly to a customer would be more analogous to a company making a public announcement about a bug, which is a different issue than how responsibility is determined within a team.
consp 6y ago
Sure you have a point, but then I do not force my plumber to do his job in far less than the time required, keep changing the plumbing requirements and make him start before the final requirements are seven known.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  What makes you think only software engineers face time and planning constraints?
- old-engineer 6y ago
  You are right. This is the flip side of not treating software as an engineering discipline. But both parties are at fault. The business treats us like non-engineers and we don’t behave like ones.
ben0x539 6y ago
This is not a cavalier attitude. The article is not minimizing the harm caused by bugs. It is attempting to direct the blame away from individuals and towards systemic causes of defects. This is necessary to be able to effectively address them. "Just be more careful" has pretty much proven not to be a successful strategy to reduce defects.
adrianN 6y ago
No, it continues to be so fragile because software engineers build virtual machines with enormous numbers of moving parts that need to change all the time but nobody wants to pay the price for exhaustive testing (not to speak of the price of formal verification). We are pretty good at writing software with a very small number of bugs, it just costs a few orders of magnitude more than normal software.
- catmanjan 6y ago
  Its because software is always "new" Imagine if an electricians invented new types of wires for every job they did I'm not sure why software is the way it is, maybe it will be more like a trade in a few decades...
  - adrianN 6y ago
    No it's because a piece of software with a few hundred thousand lines of code has a state space that boggles the mind. And then that software interacts with a dozen other services of similar size. And then new features need to be added every few weeks. It's completely incomparable to wiring up a normal house. In buildings with nontrivial electrical systems, shit hits the fan really quickly too. Just look at the absolute mess that is the fire prevention system in Berlin's new airport for example.
    - catmanjan 6y ago
      I see what you're saying, but I think electronics is equally or more complex than software, but over a longer time period Copper, plastic, other things which I have no authority to talk about, were all complex at one point in time You do make a good point about scope creep, I wonder if the early days of electronic had a similar problem because nobody knew what they wanted or what was possible? Very interesting to think about IMO
      - cutemonster 6y ago
        I'd think so. If you were to install one of Tesla's early first AC motors, it'd sometimes do unexpected things or stop working intermittently, I suppose
cerberusss 6y ago
Yeah I'd accept it from my dentist. A couple of years ago, they gave me a dental crown for one of my upper right molars. Two months later, it chipped. It felt weird in my mouth. Why wouldn't this be acceptable? They source that crown from a supplier, and apparently there was a fault with it.
- old-engineer 6y ago
  Did they apologize and try to fix it? This is not about being perfect. The parent post is fundamentally about caring about your mistakes.
zelphirkalt 6y ago
Depends on the project, but I'd wager, that software development is a _bit_ more complex than plumbing in many cases.
- diggan 6y ago
  Make sure you're comparing them equally here. So don't compare the plumber coming to your house to fix a problem with the sink, with a software engineer working at a airspace center for example. The home-plumber vs the home-hacker and the enterprise-plumber vs the enterprise-developer is a more fair comparison, and while I'm not a plumber, I think you underestimate the complexity they deal with when working on a larger scale.
- Nicksil 6y ago
  >Depends on the project, but I'd wager, that software development is a _bit_ more complex than plumbing in many cases. This is an incredibly ignorant statement. Have you worked in that profession? Any professional engineering roles? But that all doesn't really matter because the statement becomes meaningless when qualified with "Depends on the project[...]"
  - zelphirkalt 6y ago
    Really incredible, when you have to go through university for at least 5 years, with heavy technical and at least for me mathematical lectures. Also incredible, when the complexity of IT systems is ever rising. Incredible, when we basically have to build mathematically correct systems, to make sure things work exactly like they should, including weird user wanted behavior, just for historical reasons. Also weird, that working in IT often requires a degree and that degree has requirements in educational background, which do not exist for plumbing. Besides all this incredibility, yes, I do work professionally in an engineering role. Limiting a statement is not the same as a completely making it meaningless. Of course there are plumbing projects, which are more complex than a static blog. Besides that, I would also like to remind you of the little part of the phrase "I'd wager that". I did not know, that it is an "ignorant" statement, to express ones believes.
  - jsjw7sbw 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Nicksil 6y ago
Yea, this is a really bizarre article. >It reinforces the idea that any one person or piece of code can be blamed for a given failure. That can absolutely be the case. How could it not sometimes be the case? >Short of malice, this is never the case. Never? Outside of somebody deliberately harming a system, there has never once been such an instance? >It gives the impression that, when you wrote the code, you should have written it better. This is a counterfactual that rarely holds up to examination. Lots of assertions in this piece with no supporting information. There are plenty of reasons substandard code is written by some individuals. Laziness is a big one. Apathy is another. >It positions shame as the correct emotion to feel about bugs in your code: if you were a better engineer – a better teammate – the bug wouldn’t exist. Call it whatever you want, but concern is certainly warranted. >If you’re a more senior engineer on your team, the effects of these anti-patterns are magnified: people see you apologizing for bugs, so they think that they should be striving to write bug-free code. They may feel ashamed if their code has bugs. People look up to experienced individuals within their profession. In fact, I would argue that it is even more important these senior individuals are able to accept responsibility and act accordingly; that's setting an example, something from which everyone will benefit.
- valesco 6y ago
  I think the important point is to let go of ego issues. A bug is a technical problem, how do we address a technical problem? By being level-headed and not playing the blame game. Being sorry doesn't add any relevant information and generate a strange atmosphere, like admitting a moral failing really. Any matter of substandard performance is better dealt by the management, well outside the scope of bug fixing.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    Refusing to accept responsibility for your own errors is more an ego problem than the alternative.
    - jhayward 6y ago
      No, elaborate insistence on repentance rituals, shaming, and ideologies of "personal responsibility" over systems thinking and data driven improvement is all about ego.
lawtalkinghuman 6y ago
> Would you accept such nonsense from your plumber, or your dentist, or your electrician? In the UK... Dentists: you have to have a BDS or BChD degree from a dental school at a university Plumbers: have to get NVQ diploma as well as pass Gas Safe accreditation to fit boilers and heating systems, plus get a CSCS card to work on construction sites Electricians: have to get an NVQ diploma, and to work in construction, they must also have an ECS card to work on a building site Software developers: [this is left blank as an exercise for the reader]
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  > Software developers: [this is left blank as an exercise for the reader] In fact, there's a (very popular) school of though that the more credentials you have, the less qualified you are to develop software: https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-computer-science-from-a-m-s-in-computer-science-when-it-comes-to-recruiting/ https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-compu...
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
(IMO / 2 cents) because as a software developer, you can create a huge amount of functionality in a short amount of time if you cut some corners. This just isn't the case, doesn't have nearly the fast return-on-investment that you get in other fields of engineering. I mean in electrical engineering, idea-to-working-prototype involves a lot of design and assembly first. In structural engineering, you just can't build a bridge on your own. It goes on. While in software development, I can cough up ten distinct features in a day if not more without forward design or testing.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> Would you accept such nonsense from your plumber, or your dentist, or your electrician? This would be a reasonable comparison if 90% of software developers could reliably produce bug-free code. This would be a (maybe less) reasonable comparison if 75% of software developers could reliably produce bug-free code. This would be a middling comparison if 50% of software developers could reliably produce bug-free code. This is a completely unreasonable comparison given that there have been 0 software developers ever, in the history of software, who have been able to reliably produce bug-free code. So yes, software development is orders of magnitude more difficult than plumbing, dentistry or electrician(-ing?). If you think it isn't, please feel free to jump in and prove all of us wrong.
- catalogia 6y ago
  Everybody makes mistakes, but that's no reason to never apologize.
  - commandlinefan 6y ago
    Look, if I genuinely screwed something up, sure, I'll apologize and either way I'll fix it. But if I didn't test some corner case because the software takes 30 minutes to build, another 30 minutes to start up, and can't be run without a live database and crashes with an out of memory error after it runs for more than 30 more minutes and no time has ever been allocated to improving the code quality because that's "low priority to the business" and the fix was one of the 20 I had assigned to me in this two-week "sprint", then I don't owe anybody an apology. If you think you can find somebody better, be my guest.
- dylan604 6y ago
  Orders of magnitude harder? Get over yourself. You sit in a comfy climate controlled office with perks like free food and drinks, gyms, entertainment, etc. You make a mistake, and a program doesn't run correctly. The horror!!!! An electrician, plumber, or dentist makes a mistake and that could result in someone getting hurt or even someone to die. A dentist doesn't get to run a dev/staging/prod environment before drilling into a tooth. A dentist can't roll back to a more stable previous version of the tooth they just cracked from a mistake that was made. There is no control-z in the real world outside of software devs.
chameleon_world 6y ago
With plumbing the tools of the trade have been the same for 100+ years. Pipes, wrenches, valves. It seems like every two years in the software engineering realm you have to learn to use a completely new tool in order to be valuable to a company.
fermienrico 6y ago
When you design a hammer and sell it to the end user, there are limitations on how they can use it. You simply cannot encompass and address every situation that the end user would subject the hammer to. What if they left the hammer in a hot 1500 C oven? The designer cannot design it such that it can universally work in every situation. There are usage guidelines and limitations. A hammer that melts in a furnace is considered a bug? The possibilities and test paths a piece of code can possibly take exceeds a very large number in a complex software application.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Is it really a bug when your software crashes when there is no memory available? Usually, this isn’t considered one.
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    Actually situations like this are still considered a bug in software. It is always the responsibility of the software to be resilient against externalities. Zoom should work and gracefully fail if there is not a single microphone device found on the client’s PC.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
>Why do software engineers constantly try to project that they are a special snowflake of a profession? I agree but this point is orthogonal to the main point. Plumbers and electricians build to code in an environment where physical reality remains constant and they operate on expected inputs. A civil engineer is not held to account for a failure if gravity suddenly reverses itself. If I shock a circuit board with static electricity and it fails is that an electrical engineer's fault? If I put 20,000 psi through a household plumbing system and it fails is it the plumber's fault? These designs are only expected to operate in a narrow range on a small number of expected inputs / variables and that is easier. Software can basically expect infinite permutations of inputs at any time and is expected to give good outputs and no bugs 100% of the time?
throwaway894345 6y ago
Everything exists in an economic context. Errors in plumbing, dentistry, and electrical work can result in thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, and they often can't roll out a fix in a matter of hours. Some software bugs can also result in lots of damage (financial/health data security, etc), and we do take those bugs seriously via compliance (although compliance isn't a guarantee for good software just like it's not a guarantee for good dentistry). But no one is going to pay for the effort required to perfect every software release, nor should they.
closeparen 6y ago
I hear from plumbers and electicians all the time that the last guy to work on something was an idiot. Medical errors are routine and managed through a combination of procedure and insurance, not by admonishing doctors. “Thanks for reporting this, I’ll take care of it” is accepting responsibility while avoiding a morality judgement.
spacechild1 6y ago
I totally agree with you. In fact, some branches of software engineering do have equally high standards as other engineering fields. If you write the software for a medical device or an airplane, you better make sure it doesn't have any critical bugs, otherwise people will die. If you write audio software for professional musicians, you better make sure that it doesn't have any critical bugs, so you don't ruin a live show. I think people claiming that nobody can write bug free code and you shouldn't even try simply work in environments where failures don't cause irreversible harm.

catmanjan 6y ago

I have never heard of a plumber, dentist or electrician apologizing for anything - unless you count court orders...

kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
And yet my house has never caught fire due to a miswiring or got flooded due to a misplumbing but let me not even count the ways in which software has failed me. Maybe there's a reason you rarely hear one category apologizing and hear the other category coming up with excuses.
- lvturner 6y ago
  Mine has - my plumber didn't apologise, but he did instruct me over the phone how to properly apply PTFE tape.
- stanmancan 6y ago
  Plumbing and electrical doesn’t change all too often. Once you learn the ins and outs it doesn’t change much over your career. Not the case with software development.
  - karatestomp 6y ago
    And when they do change there are very straightforward guides to the changes, when and where you can/should/must use new materials, and so on.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I know people who’ve programmed microcontrollers in C all their lives and still written bugs. It’s not like switching tooling once in a while is the source of bugs.
- jsjw7sbw 6y ago
  Still you insure your house for those things though. I think you are comparing apples with oranges here.
- erikbye 6y ago
  > but let me not even count the ways in which software has failed me. Failed you? This sounds either very entitled or sensational. Has software caused you major grief in any way financial or the loss of limbs or loved ones? While this happens, very few people are affected by bugs in such a way, at least confirmed.
  - Nicksil 6y ago
    >Failed you? This sounds either very entitled or sensational. Has software caused you major grief in any way financial or the loss of limbs or loved ones? While this happens, very few people are affected by bugs in such a way, at least confirmed. Many people have been significantly affected by software bugs. Therac-25[1] is one I constantly remind myself of; it killed 5 people. Here's a list for further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_bugs I'm not sure what your definition of "very few people" is but we'd all do well to aim for 0 adversely-affected people as a result from using software we write. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
    - erikbye 6y ago
      Read my reply again, note especially the part "While this happens". Obviously I am acutely aware of what you are saying, no matter how many Wikipedia articles you link, so your comment is not only superfluous but also makes no sense, as I was asking OP if he was personally affected in such a way because he seemed bitter. Your reply does not answer this, and you should let him answer for himself. > I'm not sure what your definition of "very few people" I think my definition is about the same as every accepted definition of "very few", the number of people affected by such bugs falls within this definition, considering how many users software has. > Many people have been significantly affected by software bugs. Therac-25[1] is one I constantly remind myself of; it killed 5 people. 5 does not fit the definition many in anyone's book.
      - a1369209993 6y ago
        > 5 does not fit the definition many in anyone's book. Well, IIRC, there's Watership Down, a literal book, but I assume you meant that figuratively.
- traderjane 6y ago
  Plenty of people are hurt or killed through clerical errors by medical professionals, but you're not going to get anyone admitting that. Even for something simple, if you have any accusation to make in a medical context, it's probably time to evaluate your options and consider a new doctor, and only then make your accusation.
- lukeschlather 6y ago
  The worst thing code I have written ever did was cause a small power outage. But that was a one-time thing, I haven't had the opportunity to write code that even could do that in years.
old-engineer 6y ago
There always will be good and bad craftsmen. I once overheard my electrician demanding the guy installing the alarm system to lay his cables properly.
adrianmonk 6y ago
This is about the dynamic between people within the organization (coworkers, boss, etc.), not about external communication to customers. That is, we aren't talking about whether an individual software engineer should apologize to the customer or the end user. So the analogous question would be whether someone who has worked as a plumber has ever heard a coworker plumber apologize for messing up a job. I'm hoping the answer to that is yes. A plumber apologizing directly to a customer would be more analogous to a company making a public announcement about a bug, which is a different issue than how responsibility is determined within a team.

consp 6y ago

Sure you have a point, but then I do not force my plumber to do his job in far less than the time required, keep changing the plumbing requirements and make him start before the final requirements are seven known.

kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
What makes you think only software engineers face time and planning constraints?
old-engineer 6y ago
You are right. This is the flip side of not treating software as an engineering discipline. But both parties are at fault. The business treats us like non-engineers and we don’t behave like ones.

ben0x539 6y ago

This is not a cavalier attitude. The article is not minimizing the harm caused by bugs. It is attempting to direct the blame away from individuals and towards systemic causes of defects. This is necessary to be able to effectively address them. "Just be more careful" has pretty much proven not to be a successful strategy to reduce defects.

adrianN 6y ago

No, it continues to be so fragile because software engineers build virtual machines with enormous numbers of moving parts that need to change all the time but nobody wants to pay the price for exhaustive testing (not to speak of the price of formal verification). We are pretty good at writing software with a very small number of bugs, it just costs a few orders of magnitude more than normal software.

catmanjan 6y ago
Its because software is always "new" Imagine if an electricians invented new types of wires for every job they did I'm not sure why software is the way it is, maybe it will be more like a trade in a few decades...
- adrianN 6y ago
  No it's because a piece of software with a few hundred thousand lines of code has a state space that boggles the mind. And then that software interacts with a dozen other services of similar size. And then new features need to be added every few weeks. It's completely incomparable to wiring up a normal house. In buildings with nontrivial electrical systems, shit hits the fan really quickly too. Just look at the absolute mess that is the fire prevention system in Berlin's new airport for example.
  - catmanjan 6y ago
    I see what you're saying, but I think electronics is equally or more complex than software, but over a longer time period Copper, plastic, other things which I have no authority to talk about, were all complex at one point in time You do make a good point about scope creep, I wonder if the early days of electronic had a similar problem because nobody knew what they wanted or what was possible? Very interesting to think about IMO
    - cutemonster 6y ago
      I'd think so. If you were to install one of Tesla's early first AC motors, it'd sometimes do unexpected things or stop working intermittently, I suppose

cerberusss 6y ago

Yeah I'd accept it from my dentist. A couple of years ago, they gave me a dental crown for one of my upper right molars. Two months later, it chipped. It felt weird in my mouth. Why wouldn't this be acceptable? They source that crown from a supplier, and apparently there was a fault with it.

old-engineer 6y ago
Did they apologize and try to fix it? This is not about being perfect. The parent post is fundamentally about caring about your mistakes.

zelphirkalt 6y ago

Depends on the project, but I'd wager, that software development is a _bit_ more complex than plumbing in many cases.

diggan 6y ago
Make sure you're comparing them equally here. So don't compare the plumber coming to your house to fix a problem with the sink, with a software engineer working at a airspace center for example. The home-plumber vs the home-hacker and the enterprise-plumber vs the enterprise-developer is a more fair comparison, and while I'm not a plumber, I think you underestimate the complexity they deal with when working on a larger scale.
Nicksil 6y ago
>Depends on the project, but I'd wager, that software development is a _bit_ more complex than plumbing in many cases. This is an incredibly ignorant statement. Have you worked in that profession? Any professional engineering roles? But that all doesn't really matter because the statement becomes meaningless when qualified with "Depends on the project[...]"
- zelphirkalt 6y ago
  Really incredible, when you have to go through university for at least 5 years, with heavy technical and at least for me mathematical lectures. Also incredible, when the complexity of IT systems is ever rising. Incredible, when we basically have to build mathematically correct systems, to make sure things work exactly like they should, including weird user wanted behavior, just for historical reasons. Also weird, that working in IT often requires a degree and that degree has requirements in educational background, which do not exist for plumbing. Besides all this incredibility, yes, I do work professionally in an engineering role. Limiting a statement is not the same as a completely making it meaningless. Of course there are plumbing projects, which are more complex than a static blog. Besides that, I would also like to remind you of the little part of the phrase "I'd wager that". I did not know, that it is an "ignorant" statement, to express ones believes.
- jsjw7sbw 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Nicksil 6y ago

Yea, this is a really bizarre article. >It reinforces the idea that any one person or piece of code can be blamed for a given failure. That can absolutely be the case. How could it not sometimes be the case? >Short of malice, this is never the case. Never? Outside of somebody deliberately harming a system, there has never once been such an instance? >It gives the impression that, when you wrote the code, you should have written it better. This is a counterfactual that rarely holds up to examination. Lots of assertions in this piece with no supporting information. There are plenty of reasons substandard code is written by some individuals. Laziness is a big one. Apathy is another. >It positions shame as the correct emotion to feel about bugs in your code: if you were a better engineer – a better teammate – the bug wouldn’t exist. Call it whatever you want, but concern is certainly warranted. >If you’re a more senior engineer on your team, the effects of these anti-patterns are magnified: people see you apologizing for bugs, so they think that they should be striving to write bug-free code. They may feel ashamed if their code has bugs. People look up to experienced individuals within their profession. In fact, I would argue that it is even more important these senior individuals are able to accept responsibility and act accordingly; that's setting an example, something from which everyone will benefit.

valesco 6y ago
I think the important point is to let go of ego issues. A bug is a technical problem, how do we address a technical problem? By being level-headed and not playing the blame game. Being sorry doesn't add any relevant information and generate a strange atmosphere, like admitting a moral failing really. Any matter of substandard performance is better dealt by the management, well outside the scope of bug fixing.
- catalogia 6y ago
  Refusing to accept responsibility for your own errors is more an ego problem than the alternative.
  - jhayward 6y ago
    No, elaborate insistence on repentance rituals, shaming, and ideologies of "personal responsibility" over systems thinking and data driven improvement is all about ego.

lawtalkinghuman 6y ago

> Would you accept such nonsense from your plumber, or your dentist, or your electrician? In the UK... Dentists: you have to have a BDS or BChD degree from a dental school at a university Plumbers: have to get NVQ diploma as well as pass Gas Safe accreditation to fit boilers and heating systems, plus get a CSCS card to work on construction sites Electricians: have to get an NVQ diploma, and to work in construction, they must also have an ECS card to work on a building site Software developers: [this is left blank as an exercise for the reader]

commandlinefan 6y ago
> Software developers: [this is left blank as an exercise for the reader] In fact, there's a (very popular) school of though that the more credentials you have, the less qualified you are to develop software: https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-computer-science-from-a-m-s-in-computer-science-when-it-comes-to-recruiting/ https://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-compu...

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

(IMO / 2 cents) because as a software developer, you can create a huge amount of functionality in a short amount of time if you cut some corners. This just isn't the case, doesn't have nearly the fast return-on-investment that you get in other fields of engineering. I mean in electrical engineering, idea-to-working-prototype involves a lot of design and assembly first. In structural engineering, you just can't build a bridge on your own. It goes on. While in software development, I can cough up ten distinct features in a day if not more without forward design or testing.

commandlinefan 6y ago

> Would you accept such nonsense from your plumber, or your dentist, or your electrician? This would be a reasonable comparison if 90% of software developers could reliably produce bug-free code. This would be a (maybe less) reasonable comparison if 75% of software developers could reliably produce bug-free code. This would be a middling comparison if 50% of software developers could reliably produce bug-free code. This is a completely unreasonable comparison given that there have been 0 software developers ever, in the history of software, who have been able to reliably produce bug-free code. So yes, software development is orders of magnitude more difficult than plumbing, dentistry or electrician(-ing?). If you think it isn't, please feel free to jump in and prove all of us wrong.

catalogia 6y ago
Everybody makes mistakes, but that's no reason to never apologize.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  Look, if I genuinely screwed something up, sure, I'll apologize and either way I'll fix it. But if I didn't test some corner case because the software takes 30 minutes to build, another 30 minutes to start up, and can't be run without a live database and crashes with an out of memory error after it runs for more than 30 more minutes and no time has ever been allocated to improving the code quality because that's "low priority to the business" and the fix was one of the 20 I had assigned to me in this two-week "sprint", then I don't owe anybody an apology. If you think you can find somebody better, be my guest.
dylan604 6y ago
Orders of magnitude harder? Get over yourself. You sit in a comfy climate controlled office with perks like free food and drinks, gyms, entertainment, etc. You make a mistake, and a program doesn't run correctly. The horror!!!! An electrician, plumber, or dentist makes a mistake and that could result in someone getting hurt or even someone to die. A dentist doesn't get to run a dev/staging/prod environment before drilling into a tooth. A dentist can't roll back to a more stable previous version of the tooth they just cracked from a mistake that was made. There is no control-z in the real world outside of software devs.

chameleon_world 6y ago

With plumbing the tools of the trade have been the same for 100+ years. Pipes, wrenches, valves. It seems like every two years in the software engineering realm you have to learn to use a completely new tool in order to be valuable to a company.

fermienrico 6y ago

When you design a hammer and sell it to the end user, there are limitations on how they can use it. You simply cannot encompass and address every situation that the end user would subject the hammer to. What if they left the hammer in a hot 1500 C oven? The designer cannot design it such that it can universally work in every situation. There are usage guidelines and limitations. A hammer that melts in a furnace is considered a bug? The possibilities and test paths a piece of code can possibly take exceeds a very large number in a complex software application.

saagarjha 6y ago
Is it really a bug when your software crashes when there is no memory available? Usually, this isn’t considered one.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  Actually situations like this are still considered a bug in software. It is always the responsibility of the software to be resilient against externalities. Zoom should work and gracefully fail if there is not a single microphone device found on the client’s PC.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

>Why do software engineers constantly try to project that they are a special snowflake of a profession? I agree but this point is orthogonal to the main point. Plumbers and electricians build to code in an environment where physical reality remains constant and they operate on expected inputs. A civil engineer is not held to account for a failure if gravity suddenly reverses itself. If I shock a circuit board with static electricity and it fails is that an electrical engineer's fault? If I put 20,000 psi through a household plumbing system and it fails is it the plumber's fault? These designs are only expected to operate in a narrow range on a small number of expected inputs / variables and that is easier. Software can basically expect infinite permutations of inputs at any time and is expected to give good outputs and no bugs 100% of the time?

throwaway894345 6y ago

Everything exists in an economic context. Errors in plumbing, dentistry, and electrical work can result in thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, and they often can't roll out a fix in a matter of hours. Some software bugs can also result in lots of damage (financial/health data security, etc), and we do take those bugs seriously via compliance (although compliance isn't a guarantee for good software just like it's not a guarantee for good dentistry). But no one is going to pay for the effort required to perfect every software release, nor should they.

closeparen 6y ago

I hear from plumbers and electicians all the time that the last guy to work on something was an idiot. Medical errors are routine and managed through a combination of procedure and insurance, not by admonishing doctors. “Thanks for reporting this, I’ll take care of it” is accepting responsibility while avoiding a morality judgement.

spacechild1 6y ago

I totally agree with you. In fact, some branches of software engineering do have equally high standards as other engineering fields. If you write the software for a medical device or an airplane, you better make sure it doesn't have any critical bugs, otherwise people will die. If you write audio software for professional musicians, you better make sure that it doesn't have any critical bugs, so you don't ruin a live show. I think people claiming that nobody can write bug free code and you shouldn't even try simply work in environments where failures don't cause irreversible harm.