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> 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 c

> 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 7y ago
Everybody makes mistakes, but that's no reason to never apologize.
- commandlinefan 7y 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 7y 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.
- michaelcampbell 7y ago
  You're conflating the difficulty of doing something "right" with the result of not doing so. Also the environment in which this happens is completely irrelevant.
- lgessler 7y ago
  GP meant "harder" in the "it's possible to get things "perfect"" sense, not in the "leads to a more challenging professional life" sense.
- user5994461 7y ago
  Try working in military applications, aerospace, tax software, medical devices, banking. Making one mistakes can affect the fates of hundreds if not millions. It's way more responsibility and risk than the job you quote. By the way. A dentist gets to try on fake tooth before drilling a real tooth. They actually don't have a choice, that's part of the mandatory training. Doctors gets to train on real people too, medicine schools go to great length to procure bodies for training purpose. In programming, one would be lucky to get any sort of test environment.
  - thisiszilff 7y ago
    Especially a test environment that accurately mirrors a production environment.
  - blinds 7y ago
    > A dentist gets to try on fake tooth before drilling a real tooth. Are you saying you went straight to writing production code before you ever studied any software engineering? Sounds unusual for practitioners of an industry endowed with such a critical responsibility. A dentist can easily kill someone through malpractice... There's no code review, there's no test environment, and there are always difficult (often time-sensitive) decisions to make and difficult people to deal with. If all you know is estimating story points and merging pull requests to make your burn-down chart look pretty you probably shouldn't be so confident that your profession is more difficult or more superior than one that you have no understanding of.
flippinburgers 7y ago
You have got to be kidding me. Do you even understand the consequences of making mistakes in other fields? In some cases an apology isn't even enough. In some cases imprisonment and an utterly ruined career are the result of mistakes. So the idea that apologizing shouldn't happen as a programmer is complete rubbish.
- jhayward 7y ago
  > In some cases imprisonment and an utterly ruined career are the result of mistakes This is quite an exaggerated point; the number of people imprisoned for making mechanical, civil, or electrical engineering errors is very close to zero in the US. I think more programmers have actually been charged than any other field, although I can't quote a statistic to back that up.
  - flippinburgers 7y ago
    Architects absolutely have gone to prison for building something in a shoddy manner that results in death.

catalogia 7y ago

Everybody makes mistakes, but that's no reason to never apologize.

commandlinefan 7y 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 7y 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.

michaelcampbell 7y ago
You're conflating the difficulty of doing something "right" with the result of not doing so. Also the environment in which this happens is completely irrelevant.
lgessler 7y ago
GP meant "harder" in the "it's possible to get things "perfect"" sense, not in the "leads to a more challenging professional life" sense.
user5994461 7y ago
Try working in military applications, aerospace, tax software, medical devices, banking. Making one mistakes can affect the fates of hundreds if not millions. It's way more responsibility and risk than the job you quote. By the way. A dentist gets to try on fake tooth before drilling a real tooth. They actually don't have a choice, that's part of the mandatory training. Doctors gets to train on real people too, medicine schools go to great length to procure bodies for training purpose. In programming, one would be lucky to get any sort of test environment.
- thisiszilff 7y ago
  Especially a test environment that accurately mirrors a production environment.
- blinds 7y ago
  > A dentist gets to try on fake tooth before drilling a real tooth. Are you saying you went straight to writing production code before you ever studied any software engineering? Sounds unusual for practitioners of an industry endowed with such a critical responsibility. A dentist can easily kill someone through malpractice... There's no code review, there's no test environment, and there are always difficult (often time-sensitive) decisions to make and difficult people to deal with. If all you know is estimating story points and merging pull requests to make your burn-down chart look pretty you probably shouldn't be so confident that your profession is more difficult or more superior than one that you have no understanding of.

flippinburgers 7y ago

You have got to be kidding me. Do you even understand the consequences of making mistakes in other fields? In some cases an apology isn't even enough. In some cases imprisonment and an utterly ruined career are the result of mistakes. So the idea that apologizing shouldn't happen as a programmer is complete rubbish.

jhayward 7y ago
> In some cases imprisonment and an utterly ruined career are the result of mistakes This is quite an exaggerated point; the number of people imprisoned for making mechanical, civil, or electrical engineering errors is very close to zero in the US. I think more programmers have actually been charged than any other field, although I can't quote a statistic to back that up.
- flippinburgers 7y ago
  Architects absolutely have gone to prison for building something in a shoddy manner that results in death.