3 ms·

Do you think the mechanical side of a car is any better? Stuff routinely fails in weird "unforeseen" ways.

• Arainach 5y ago
  "Wait 8 months and your car will start working again" has never been an acceptable answer for the mechanical side. It's not an acceptable answer for the digital side either, but that doesn't stop teams from trying to use it.
  • whateveracct 5y ago
    If it was actually a severe issue, I'm sure there are ways to deploy a fix. But the cost-benefit is clearly not there for this kind of meh issue. Bad PR is the main downside here.
    • superfrank 5y ago
      Exactly. The person you're responding to is mixing business and engineering decisions. There's always a fix, it might just be expensive. If this was a critical safety issue that had the ability to kill tens of thousands of people and cost the company billions of dollars, teams would work night and day to rewrite the code and they would bring the cars in and replace the navigation systems with ones that work. But this isn't a critical issue... Someone has done a cost benefit analysis and decided it's cheaper to just tell people to wait until August and make whole any customer who throws a fit about it. There's "no solution" because no solution is cheaper than the actual solution to the problem. <insert Fight Club quote here>
  • nexuist 5y ago
    > "Wait 8 months and your car will start working again" has never been an acceptable answer for the mechanical side The same side that routinely totals the entire car for minor fender benders? Yeah, all software would be great if we could just tell our clients to fuck off whenever they bring in some garbage for us to fix! You want a fixed car? Go buy a new one lol! But we don't have that privilege, so this is what happens.
    • quickthrowman 5y ago
      > The same side that routinely totals the entire car for minor fender benders? Which side is that? Insurance companies total out cars based on repair value exceeding the car’s value. If you want to fork out your own cash, nobody is going to refuse to fix it.
      • nexuist 5y ago
        Right, that's how insurance companies do it because it makes sense. Have you ever heard of software systems routinely being "totaled"? And yet the expectation is for the software to be more reliable than the hardware despite years and years of tech debt.
        • Spooky23 5y ago
          All. Of. The. Time. A couple of years ago I was a tech lead on a project that “totaled” a 30 year old, perfectly functional application and migrated it to a big cloud solution. Remember during COVID hearing about state unemployment systems running on obsolete mainframes? The dirty little secret there is that many states use a semi-standardized solution developed by IBM in the 80s (when the Feds spent a bunch of money to computerize unemployment insurance). The mainframe stuff is solid, the garbage bolted to it for IVR and web support 20 years ago is not. Because of that poor stewardship, the Federal government will probably spend billions over the next decade totalling those systems.
          • nexuist 5y ago
            In both of your examples the existing projects were 30-40 years old...there are 2022 model cars getting totaled right now. It's not comparable. How many 40 year old cars do you see getting totaled?
  • dylan604 5y ago
    Personally, I drive around with the clock off by one hour for half the year. So as long as it is just the clock, then put me in the "I don't care" column.
  • R0b0t1 5y ago
    Just waiting for your car to start working is strictly an improvement. Usually your engine or drive train suffers unforeseen failure and burns up.
• userbinator 5y ago
  The science of mechanical wear is well-known and has had many more decades to mature.
  • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    As opposed to science of counting, right?