4 ms·

We should not blame "the gov" or "organizations". This kind of crap was coded by someone, maybe more than one person. These are the people to blame. Our profess

by rvr_ 5y ago

We should not blame "the gov" or "organizations". This kind of crap was coded by someone, maybe more than one person. These are the people to blame. Our profession will never be a truly profession until we (developers) are not held accountable for the crap code that we wrote.

BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
Our profession has a relationship with complexity that no other engineering discipline has to deal with. Other engineers can reasonably design around known variability in the environment. You can engineer a 4x safety margin in a bridge. No such concreteness exists for programs. When we make a product, we really have no idea what the landscape of computing will look like in the future. Even the projects that are less than five years old that I’ve worked on have had so much grafted onto them that I barely recognize what I had originally wrote for it. My hunch is that the email system is basically a “legacy app” that had more and more jammed into it as time went on. The prudent thing to do would have been to go with a new provider, but that is extremely expensive compared to jamming new features like that script into it. In this scenario, how would a developer be held accountable? Would telling a judge “I really didn’t want to write this code but the client demanded these changes” be a viable defense?
- namibj 5y ago
  If the dev has that in writing, sure.
  - etherealG 5y ago
    and now you just described every dev ever becoming more of a lawyer than a dev. why would we want that?
authed 5y ago
It's called job security... imagine if anything else was built like modern software...
KronisLV 5y ago
> This kind of crap was coded by someone, maybe more than one person. These are the people to blame. I'd say it depends on why the actual problem is there. Did a developer get strong armed into ignoring any potential problems by the management because it was necessary to ship software to meet some made up deadline? I don't think the blame lies with the developer, perhaps more so with the management. Did a junior developer get tasked with getting something done with ancient technologies that just refuse to cooperate with them properly, without any processes being in place to catch these sorts of issues? I don't think the blame lies entirely with the developer, perhaps more so with the overall environment and the lack of testing, QA and other processes. Did some developer just not care? Then the blame probably lies with the developer, but if that's the case, why are they even employed in the org, and why wasn't their work caught in one way or another before hitting prod? Honestly, if we introduce full criminal responsibility for the code that individual contributors write, we'll end up with the same situation that happens in countries that choose to make their doctors have criminal responsibility for procedures gone wrong - they'll simply choose to work in other countries where they're not faced with such circumstances.

by rvr_ 5y ago

BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago

Our profession has a relationship with complexity that no other engineering discipline has to deal with. Other engineers can reasonably design around known variability in the environment. You can engineer a 4x safety margin in a bridge. No such concreteness exists for programs. When we make a product, we really have no idea what the landscape of computing will look like in the future. Even the projects that are less than five years old that I’ve worked on have had so much grafted onto them that I barely recognize what I had originally wrote for it. My hunch is that the email system is basically a “legacy app” that had more and more jammed into it as time went on. The prudent thing to do would have been to go with a new provider, but that is extremely expensive compared to jamming new features like that script into it. In this scenario, how would a developer be held accountable? Would telling a judge “I really didn’t want to write this code but the client demanded these changes” be a viable defense?

namibj 5y ago
If the dev has that in writing, sure.
- etherealG 5y ago
  and now you just described every dev ever becoming more of a lawyer than a dev. why would we want that?

authed 5y ago

It's called job security... imagine if anything else was built like modern software...

KronisLV 5y ago

> This kind of crap was coded by someone, maybe more than one person. These are the people to blame. I'd say it depends on why the actual problem is there. Did a developer get strong armed into ignoring any potential problems by the management because it was necessary to ship software to meet some made up deadline? I don't think the blame lies with the developer, perhaps more so with the management. Did a junior developer get tasked with getting something done with ancient technologies that just refuse to cooperate with them properly, without any processes being in place to catch these sorts of issues? I don't think the blame lies entirely with the developer, perhaps more so with the overall environment and the lack of testing, QA and other processes. Did some developer just not care? Then the blame probably lies with the developer, but if that's the case, why are they even employed in the org, and why wasn't their work caught in one way or another before hitting prod? Honestly, if we introduce full criminal responsibility for the code that individual contributors write, we'll end up with the same situation that happens in countries that choose to make their doctors have criminal responsibility for procedures gone wrong - they'll simply choose to work in other countries where they're not faced with such circumstances.