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The difference between software and most other forms of engineering is that the internals of software are invisible to everyone but the developers. A manager wa

The difference between software and most other forms of engineering is that the internals of software are invisible to everyone but the developers. A manager walks in to the warehouse you describe above and goes “what in the literal hell? No one goes home until we clean this $&@$ up!”. A machine that has been poorly designed looks like a piece crap. Software, if the UI looks nice the massive tangled mess inside is completely invisible to customer and manager alike. Gross inefficiencies, evil hacks, everything entangled with everything? No one can see it. “Why does it take 3 months for a tiny feature?” “Technical debt”, “ok, you can have 5% of your time budget to sort that out”… If people could really see the software, viscerally, they would approve budgets to fix it.

ignoramous 4y ago
> If people could really see the software, viscerally, they would approve budgets to fix it. Tools for this exist; ex: https://semgrep.dev/docs/writing-rules/data-flow/data-flow-overview/ https://semgrep.dev/docs/writing-rules/data-flow/data-flow-o... I suspect the information overload for any substantially large code base would be such that, non-engineers would look right past the complexity after the enthusiasm wears off.
8n4vidtmkvmk 4y ago
Technical managers do look at code...they often don't really "see" the problems until they try to implement something tho.
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  Yeah the best way to understand software (maybe even the only way) is to try to do something with it.