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> "No one knows what they’re doing, and it’s a civilizational problem." This last bullet point unintentionally describes the root cause and settles all the art

> "No one knows what they’re doing, and it’s a civilizational problem." This last bullet point unintentionally describes the root cause and settles all the article's complaints. How? Because this is plain factually incorrect. Just like how it works for the rest of civilization, someone does (or did) indeed know what the computer is doing for any given component within any layer of code. Complaining about computers in this way is exactly the same as complaining about the inefficiencies of government or other large organizations. What's changed is how much every aspect of the software must have "moving parts" so to speak. The most efficient solution is not necessarily the best solution anymore now that so many people from non-technical backgrounds are stakeholders in software development. Hardware improvements have allowed for far more complex software and greater speed has indeed been achieved where it counts (the lower level operations). Just because a GUI is slow doesn't mean the underlying system is slow. A user's perspective is inherently biased, selfish, and inaccurate. The sheer scale at which we deploy software today has a cost too and it's more important than perceived (in)efficiency despite being less glamorous.

layer8 4y ago
> someone does (or did) indeed know what the computer is doing for any given component within any layer of code. It’s not unusual that code isn’t quite doing what its author thinks it’s doing. Secondly, the “did know” is important. The detailed comprehension of what some code is (supposed to be) doing tends to fade quicker than we would like, and intent often goes undocumented.
- sublinear 4y ago
  The cost of maintaining undocumented and/or poorly written code is far lower than maintaining the physical infrastructure the code may have replaced though. It's great that the industry still has enthusiasm to always improve, but this is not a technical problem. What we are experiencing are organizational problems. Not to kick a hornet's nest, but the flip side of this problem is so many software devs not wanting to work in management.
  - layer8 4y ago
    My perception is that new code gets written at a much faster pace than existing code has any chance to keep getting maintained. There is incredible churn. The other issue is that almost everything is built on leaky abstractions and underlying software components with inherent design problems, that are hard to reason about, and which remain unfixed because of backwards compatibility and/or because no one understands the code anymore. Moreover, almost every time you want to fix something, you run into issues in the next lower level of the software stack that you have to work around, or just resign to gloss over. I agree that it’s a management problem in terms of priorities, but the technical problems are very real.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Complaining about computers in this way is exactly the same as complaining about the inefficiencies of government or other large organizations. And those would be valid complaints, no? You seem to be defending the system as-is, as inevitable, and dismissing ambitions about the world as it could be as if they were the words of dreamers, and ungrateful idealogues. One should not use our current dependency on broken systems as a self justification. That's unfalsifiable, as we don't get a null hypothesis re-run the history of computing where we made better decisions. I think the article is spot-on as an observation. And the last remark about it being an intrinsic "civilisational" problem, while seeming whiney, should not be dismissed if we are serious about solving many of the problems that technology has created as the price for progress. To simply accept it as an immutable feature is defeatist. We have to believe there are are better technologies than those which mirror the failings of big organisational inefficiency.
- thewebcount 4y ago
  > You seem to be defending the system as-is, as inevitable, and dismissing ambitions about the world as it could be as if they were the words of dreamers, and ungrateful idealogues. That’s not how I read what they wrote. I read it as, “we got here because people voted with their wallets/feet/attention/time to get us here. We have inefficient government, etc. for the same reasons. The ‘problem’, if there is one, is that we have a lot of competing, sometimes contradictory, desires and no clear winner. It evolved this way.” I didn’t feel they were saying it’s inevitable or unchangeable, just that it happened because that’s how a bunch of different people reacted to the situation. If they had acted differently, we’d be somewhere else.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    I'm really glad you wrote that. I read the OP again, and didn't see any different. But what I did see is the distortion in my own lenses. There's some _reason_ I can't read the OP differently, and it's about my stuff. Thanks for shining a different light on it.

layer8 4y ago

> someone does (or did) indeed know what the computer is doing for any given component within any layer of code. It’s not unusual that code isn’t quite doing what its author thinks it’s doing. Secondly, the “did know” is important. The detailed comprehension of what some code is (supposed to be) doing tends to fade quicker than we would like, and intent often goes undocumented.

sublinear 4y ago
The cost of maintaining undocumented and/or poorly written code is far lower than maintaining the physical infrastructure the code may have replaced though. It's great that the industry still has enthusiasm to always improve, but this is not a technical problem. What we are experiencing are organizational problems. Not to kick a hornet's nest, but the flip side of this problem is so many software devs not wanting to work in management.
- layer8 4y ago
  My perception is that new code gets written at a much faster pace than existing code has any chance to keep getting maintained. There is incredible churn. The other issue is that almost everything is built on leaky abstractions and underlying software components with inherent design problems, that are hard to reason about, and which remain unfixed because of backwards compatibility and/or because no one understands the code anymore. Moreover, almost every time you want to fix something, you run into issues in the next lower level of the software stack that you have to work around, or just resign to gloss over. I agree that it’s a management problem in terms of priorities, but the technical problems are very real.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

> Complaining about computers in this way is exactly the same as complaining about the inefficiencies of government or other large organizations. And those would be valid complaints, no? You seem to be defending the system as-is, as inevitable, and dismissing ambitions about the world as it could be as if they were the words of dreamers, and ungrateful idealogues. One should not use our current dependency on broken systems as a self justification. That's unfalsifiable, as we don't get a null hypothesis re-run the history of computing where we made better decisions. I think the article is spot-on as an observation. And the last remark about it being an intrinsic "civilisational" problem, while seeming whiney, should not be dismissed if we are serious about solving many of the problems that technology has created as the price for progress. To simply accept it as an immutable feature is defeatist. We have to believe there are are better technologies than those which mirror the failings of big organisational inefficiency.

thewebcount 4y ago
> You seem to be defending the system as-is, as inevitable, and dismissing ambitions about the world as it could be as if they were the words of dreamers, and ungrateful idealogues. That’s not how I read what they wrote. I read it as, “we got here because people voted with their wallets/feet/attention/time to get us here. We have inefficient government, etc. for the same reasons. The ‘problem’, if there is one, is that we have a lot of competing, sometimes contradictory, desires and no clear winner. It evolved this way.” I didn’t feel they were saying it’s inevitable or unchangeable, just that it happened because that’s how a bunch of different people reacted to the situation. If they had acted differently, we’d be somewhere else.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  I'm really glad you wrote that. I read the OP again, and didn't see any different. But what I did see is the distortion in my own lenses. There's some _reason_ I can't read the OP differently, and it's about my stuff. Thanks for shining a different light on it.