9 ms·

> I quickly found out that IS research had already figured most of this out > People suck, organizations suck, societies suck and yet you don't see very many

by chii 3y ago

> I quickly found out that IS research had already figured most of this out > People suck, organizations suck, societies suck and yet you don't see very many buildings collapse, bridges fail, and damns flood down valley. The idea is that there should be liability assigned to important systems, for which this liability makes the onus on the creator/owner to build in safe guards, checks or other protections to prevent disasters. Why this isn't applied to software engineering is a whole nother story, but i think it probably should. Move fast and break things is not something i wanted to hear tbh.

saurik 3y ago
Even Facebook realized it was dumb and Mark Zuckerberg apologized to us all on stage at f8 a decade or so ago and said they were now going to say "move fast with stable infra", yet I still see tons of people fetishize and emulate the original.
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  Honestly though, FB wouldn't have won without the move fast and break things approach. But different techniques work at different scales of company. You're doing super well if you're successful enough that some of your values need to be re-written.
  - jacobr1 3y ago
    And even then they didn't pivot to "don't break anything." They still are willing to break user workflows are quickly test new features that have a high risk of being rolled back. They key is that they are able to set more explicit tradeoffs on the risk they want to take relative the benefits and what scenarios they want to optimize. The same applies to all engineering disciplines - arguably managing requirements and tradeoffs to produce a working system is what makes something a work of engineering vs another discipline.
stevefan1999 3y ago
> and yet you don't see very many buildings collapse, bridges fail, and damns flood down valley Computers, at its best existed for only 200 years. That's counting from the difference engine that Babbage never finished building, and if we are talking about the first modern computer that does contribute significantly in a way, that's around the time ENVAC and Z3 appeared, just around 80 years. Structural Engineering existed for over 2000 years. With that comes with a lot of people died in natural disasters and advancing material science to improve structural integrity. But even the Japanese to this day still can't solve the earthquake and the problems the fallout makes. > Why this isn't applied to software engineering is a whole nother story I actually think it is. That's why real-time operating system and mission-critical hardware exists for human to fly in the air and explore the space, not counting a lot of time-sensitive industry robotics software that controls the actuators in real time as well. That said, the strict requirements of real-time programming requires a lot of expertise such as CPU cycle counting, CPU slack reduction, timing requirements and choice of algorithm (such as EDF scheduling and real time memory allocators like TLSF, and you won't see jemalloc on embedded devices, right?), stack or heap memory allocation which also complicates the programming stuff, because removing malloc might free you from OOM but this means a lot of functions needs to accept extra parameters to state the output location, and that means a lot of normal software can't be used. (You can go for a hybrid approach by using arena allocation, but that still isn't a perfect solution) As you see, even for soft real time engineering (which I actually mentioned so far, I don't know much about the real hardcore "hard real time engineering" though), the sheer complexity here already, means there's a lot of design decisions which simply just makes people stay away and just go for normal software engineering (but in the end, if everything is predicable its fine). > Move fast and break things is not something i wanted to hear tbh. When Zuckerberg said that, he's referring to his startup mindset when Facebook was really just a startup in his day. In a highly competitive market environment, startups has to fight desperately for their own survival, even with lots of fundings and VC rounds. Startup can move very fast and their agility is the only weapon against the old dogs. Now you've become one of the old dogs, you don't break things.
- Macha 3y ago
  Also for much of that 2000 years, most bridges that weren't big landmarks were somewhat consumable. It's not uncommon in small towns in Europe to have the bridge from the first half of the twentieth century, built because the nineteenth century bridge washed away in a storm, and that bridge was built because the seventeenth century bridge fell down from lack of maintenance.
PakG1 3y ago
There is something about how buildings, bridges, and damns are tangible and therefore easier for people to conceptualize and appreciate. There is a natural literacy there in that you don't have to understand what goes into making a bridge to understand the consequences of having a bad bridge. Meanwhile, software's inner workings are encapsulated so that they're not self-evident as to consequences if things go awry. Furthermore, software is inconsistent in how it works, and this trains people to think that software is just naturally glitchy, but the glitches aren't a big deal. See the joke about different types of engineers also: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/pqr8t3/four_engineers_get_into_a_car_the_car_wont_start/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/pqr8t3/four_engineer... The mechanical engineer says: “It’s a broken starter” The electrical engineer says: “Dead battery” The chemical engineer says: “Impurities in the gasoline” The IT engineer says: “Hey guys, I have an idea, how about we all get out of the car and get back in” If that's what the IT guy recommends, how do you get users, never mind corporate managers and executives, to take software system quality seriously? Obviously, this isn't what a proper software guy will think, the proper software guy knows that things are a bit more complex than that. But this is what the software guy communicates to non-technical people. And only a few rare non-technical people will tell the software guy, "OK, look, just tell me what's really going on here, how deep the problem is, and what we need to do to fix it, no matter what it takes." Most people won't have the time for that because fact of the matter is that the system satisfices needs until it doesn't, and then it's too late.
- mjevans 3y ago
  Software is more like blueprints/processes for manufacturing. When something doesn't work right it's a yield rate issue. Oops the process failed, try it again. Software can, and should, also be helpfully smarter. Where there's a chance for invalid inputs, they should be validated. That would help with errors like: * Authentication failed, check your account credentials. * Could not connect to remote server. * Invalid data input, failed to parse around byte/octet 1,234,666, near line 56789 (printable filtered) text: 'Invalid String Example Here' Yes, those are my take on 'software' versions of the starter, battery, and impurity. Lots of well written software will do this, mostly good compilers for software. Poorly written software, often hides these errors if it even collects them at all. PHBs and other less professional people seem allergic to thinking, for them it's easier to call in a specialist or just not do it with the broken tool.
charcircuit 3y ago
It's easier for software to have a catastrophic failure than a building, bridge, or dam. It's not really a fair comparison when those are like easy mode compared to software.
- scott_w 3y ago
  I don't think it's "easy mode" and more that they're just very different domains. As time goes on, I feel more and more strongly that we shouldn't compare software engineering with other types of engineering at all. My younger brother works in the structural engineering space and the types of issues he's faced across different roles is very different to the types of issues I face in software. Building design and construction have to handle the physical world and dealing with the realities of physically building the structure. Once it's built, however, the occupants don't make drastic changes to the building itself. In comparison, something like Facebook or Twitter needed to change drastically just to remain usable as they grew. "Just stop adding users" isn't a sensible solution to the problem. Just to be clear that I do not excuse the, frankly, shit software design of Horizon and the fucking appalling behaviour of the Post Office throughout this scandal. I do think, however, that comparing software engineering the other types of engineering does a disservice to all and doesn't take us closer to actually improving the craft.
  - Verdex 3y ago
    I've got ~15 years of software development under my belt. And I've also experienced a 2ish year stint where I was exposed to a lot of structural engineering. The structural engineers take a piece of steel out into the desert and they dump sand on it until it collapses. Then they divide whatever weight the sand was by 3 and write it down into a book which is then published for all the other structural engineers. This type of steel with this type of configuration with this length can hold up to this much weight. Meanwhile, in software engineering the limiting factor that prevents collapse is often "these sets of constraints and requirements are too complicated for the team to keep track of in their heads in this messy codebase". Not only do we not have a way to test this and publish the results, it's not even obvious what exactly you're even trying to measure. [Cyclomatic complexity isn't very well correlated to defects (iirc lines of code is better correlated). Design patterns, best practices, and code smells are all just poetry that we use to story tell our ways out of blame. And Weyuker's 9 Properties are at best a waste of time. There is currently no way to measure bad code that fails under load until it does so in production.]
thom 3y ago
This is a British scandal, and we’re quite capable of avoiding consequences for malfeasance in every sector of our economy, not just IT thank you very much.
- blitzar 3y ago
  computer says no
- paganel 3y ago
  The Grenfell Tower fire comes to mind, as someone was mentioning above how this sort of stuff rarely happens when it comes to buildings and the like. As far as I know there were no real consequences for the people that were directly responsible for that tragedy.
  - scott_w 3y ago
    Not only no consequences, it looks like they're trying to cash in by rinsing the occupants for the cost to remove the cladding on similar buildings!
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      They're protecting property owners at every step. Why haven't they condemned large/tall buildings with inadaquate stairwells for fire evacuation (in fact, given the timeline of the fire, Grenfell's single staircase would have been amply adaquate to evacuate the building before people started dying)? Because that would totally hose the people who own such buildings. And why aren't they requiring large buildings to have adaquate staircases? Because that would eat into profitable floorspace. The UK prioritizes property owner profit.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        >The UK prioritizes property owner profit. So the US didn't fall far from the tree. It's just like 'daddy'. <wipes away imperial tear>
      - 3y ago
spacechild1 3y ago
For me the biggest joke is that these people call themselves "software engineers" in the first place.
- PakG1 3y ago
  The unfortunate reality is that everyone else has accepted that they are software engineers. That unfortunately trumps what "real" software engineers think.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  You've been downvoted by people who value the word "engineer" in their job title even though they haven't earned it. The title is valued because real engineers have earned a great deal of respect through their diligence, and software "engineers" are for the most part parasites leeching off that respect earned by others.
  - spacechild1 3y ago
    Yes. I come from a country where 'engineer' (German: 'Ingenieur') is a title with strict requirements by law. You cannot just call yourself 'engineer' without the appropriate degree or certificates. These people have been called 'software developers' or just 'programmers' back in the day. In fact, I'd argue that most commercial software development is more like plumbing than engineering. Here's a hint: if you're writing control software for airplanes, medical devices or industrial plants, you're an engineer; if you're developing a UI frontend for a website, you're probably not.
    - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
      What if it’s a UI/frontend for a website that manages a safety-critical system?
      - spacechild1 3y ago
        Then it might be :)
cornel_io 3y ago
This isn't a story about software engineering, it's a story about a shitty governmental department in a mediocre country not fixing something that everyone knows is broken, and threatening people with jail time instead. Show me a similar story about stuff this bad happening at Google and I'll believe that there's something wrong with the field as practiced at its best.
- jack_riminton 3y ago
  The wider 'mood music' is also key here; the government was in the process of privatizing the Post Office i.e. so that they weren't the sole equity owner. Every decision (or non-decision, more appropriately) stemmed from that. This is why the CEO was rewarded with a CBE and a cushy NHS post in 2019 when the scandal was in full swing. She was acting like a good girl for her political masters in managing the crisis, stringing it out long enough in the hope that everyone would forget
- uconnectlol 3y ago
  the software bugged and said they commited fraud, thats still half the problem and is a good time to repeat "stop putting software in things". we still need 40 more years before software "engineers" grow up and start doing things even anything near correctly. the other half of the problem is those people who just want tech for every problem. they just want shiny buttons, regardless of if they work. i dont know why but everything that these companies like fujitsu, hp, dell, acer, asus, sony, samsung, etc are all complete shit. i would vote to remove the government if they told me theyre going to start using some fujitsu product to decide who should go to jail. i just noticed a $6000 vent hood where if you adjust the fan speed you cant toggle the light within the next few seconds. even lay people understand that there is no reason for this aside from what could only be reasonably understood as absolute shit engineering. the problem is people asking idiots who cant program even a simple button, to program serious enterprise, government, and military systems.
arcade79 3y ago
> and yet you don't see very many buildings collapse, bridges fail, and damns flood down valley. Hi! Let me tell you about my wonderful country. Norway! I'm sure you've heard about it. The socialist utopia in Scandinavia! ;-) The Braskereidfoss dam failed during a flood last fall. Luckily just a 'river dam' and not a reservoir dam. Still rather bad. Oh, and during the same freak whether event, but different place in the country. The Randklev railway bridge failed over the river Lågen, just by Ringebu. And during the last 8 years, we've had two road bridges collapse. One by Sjoa in 2016 (Perkolo bridge) and then 16 months ago Tretten bridge. We had the fantastic idea of building wooden bridge sfor road traffic. Here's a nice article on Tretten bridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tretten_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tretten_Bridge But yeah, not too many building collapses . Just a bunch of infrastructure collapse.
where-group-by 3y ago
When a dam or a bridge breaks it is game over. When software breaks you restart and it's back to "working" order. It would be a different scenario if the computer would set itself on fire on failure.
- palm-tree 3y ago
  Except when it's critical software in an aircraft, nuclear power plant, submarine, financial institution etc etc
  - where-group-by 3y ago
    Of course, or something as mundane as BIOS.
ivanhoe 3y ago
> Move fast and break things is not something i wanted to hear tbh. Moving safely means moving slow, and that costs more - it's as simple as that. Plus it would also automatically disqualify like 80% of the workforce, due to the need for a proper formal education and certification, which would literally paralyze the industry. And the current solution is not that different from what we have e.g. in civil engineering, the building codes for high-rise buildings are way more strict and complex than the regulations for a garden shed - in many places no permit is needed at all for it. And sometimes that means that that shad will fall in a catastrophic way, too.
- Yoric 3y ago
  > Moving safely means moving slow, and that costs more - it's as simple as that. Plus it would also automatically disqualify like 80% of the workforce, due to the need for a proper formal education and certification, which would literally paralyze the industry. Would that be so bad, in the grand scheme of things?
- ghaff 3y ago
  In the US, professional engineering licenses tend to be required when you're signing off on things for regulators. Which is common in Civil Engineering and Architects; it's not actually that common with Mechanical Engineers and isn't even available any longer for Software. But you're right, it generally requires you have a 4-year degree and have worked under a licensed engineer for some number of years.
  - anthk 3y ago
    In Europe it is. At least in potential life endangering environments. Maybe not for a web page for the govermenmt in order to apply for trivial documents such as the national ID; but for stuff like Healthcare backends, any self-called Engineer from the US couldn't even join that project without a Bachelor Degree.
    - brnt 3y ago
      I've worked in this area (in Europe) and that is nonsense. There is no requirement, other thans on the software itself. Bachelor-ish people are generally recruited, but not for their degree, but their skills (and low cost).
fzeindl 3y ago
> Why this isn't applied to software engineering is a whole nother story, but i think it probably should. Because bits don‘t rot and while you need to build a new bridge now and then which will include your learnings from the old one, you never have to replace software because it can be copied ad infinitum.
- whyever 3y ago
  Metaphorically speaking, bits do rot, this is an expression for software stopping to work as the environment changes over time: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bit-rot.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bit-rot.html
phatfish 3y ago
I think one of the issues is that software engineers are building on sand. Civil engineers have Newton and Einstein to fall back on. It feels like there is no ground truth in computing, each layer has to assume the layer below is generating random errors and try to account for that, because humans are not perfect. The laws of physics stay the same, technology is constantly changing.
- jimnotgym 3y ago
  When you get trained as a Chartered Engineer/Surveyor/Accountant/Purchaser etc you get schooled in ethics, professionalism, whistle blowing, how to deal with being unfairly pressurised etc. Never mind Newton, professional standards would have really helped here.
- uconnectlol 3y ago
  yes, and instead of numerical values that can be corrected with straightforward mathematical techniques, you have contracts (API) that are either broken or not, and theres nothing you can do about it, i mean unless you want to write thousands of extra lines of code to account for every combination of the lower layer misbehaving
jimnotgym 3y ago
> and yet you don't see very many buildings collapse, bridges fail, and damns flood down valley. Because those engineers are required to have rigorous qualifications. Please see my comment linked below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39014625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39014625
berniedurfee 3y ago
I always figure the major difference between software engineering and engineering physical things, is that software is virtual and fluid. Once a physical thing is built or being manufactured, the cost of change is exponentially higher than with software. So software engineers can experiment more frequently and can get away with low quality, as it can always be fixed later. Of course, this same mentality can carry into industries where the stakes are life and death, which is where accountability is very much lacking.
xlii 3y ago
I’ll bite. It’s that way because software is much much much more complex than that. Building is a good example. One architect after university has enough knowledge and mental capability to design a building that won’t topple: There are discrete number of parameters to work on and fallible elements are identified and understood very well. There’s manageable amount of degrees of freedom that architect is working with. It’s also not very common for physics to get an annual update. But when you go to funny-cat-pictures.com there are layers upon layers of complexity. There’s TCP, UDP, traffic encryption, indefinite number of hoops in routing, indefinite number of electronic devices with various quality, etc. Request comes happens from millions lines of code operating system and generation happens on a different millions lines of code of operating system with thousands of lines of codes of software code that interacts with databases, proxies, CDNs, load balancers and is templating, serving, translating, transpiling, compiling and serving while defending against adverse attacks, managing the cache, optimizing for network topology and requester rendering software. That changes every single day slightly. In 99% the worst case is - your picture won’t load. But when you get to the more serious software development (in a way that it’s critical domain, not that “serve cat pictures” isn’t serious job, mind you) all of it is very very visible. Every element is so unimaginably complex that it has literal tomes of knowledge written and published about it. Describing every element of transaction between end user and cat serving website would take hundreds of pages - and it would be different than other cat website. Most of the building, bridges etc. was made either by one person or small group of people working on it. Rarely software is written seldom, and many well known products have tens of thousands of inconceivable smart engineers and we still can make fun of their - not so rare - failures. So yeah. Systems suck, organizations suck, people suck. But they suck in relatively safe but also complex environment. For years software engineering was made fun of because it’s not real engineering. But when you look close enough the environment is orders of magnitude more difficult. Civil engineers might be offended but they can’t hold a candle to structures software is keeping straight. Software is a bridge built on a raft, floating on an ocean, which tries to get shot down by armed pirates and semi-controlled by a cost-saving manager trying to look good in annual progress report.
- diffeomorphism 3y ago
  > Q: Why is the quality of your work worse? > A: Because I am very, very smrt and engineering is for babies. Lol. Sounds like someone was very upset about being called "not a real engineer".
scotty79 3y ago
> and yet you don't see very many buildings collapse, bridges fail, and damns flood down valley Maybe that's survivor bias? Crappy organizations fail at infrastructure projects before they even get off the ground. Conversly softer endeavors involving just money, people and services can operate for a long time on finger crossing.
deanishe 3y ago
> Why this isn't applied to software engineering is a whole nother story, but i think it probably should. Money, for one thing. Actually building the thing IRL is the expensive bit, but it's effectively free for software. So engineers are incentivised to get things right the first time, and software developers are not. It's much cheaper to skimp on QA, let users find your fuck-ups, and push an update.

by chii 3y ago

saurik 3y ago

Even Facebook realized it was dumb and Mark Zuckerberg apologized to us all on stage at f8 a decade or so ago and said they were now going to say "move fast with stable infra", yet I still see tons of people fetishize and emulate the original.

disgruntledphd2 3y ago
Honestly though, FB wouldn't have won without the move fast and break things approach. But different techniques work at different scales of company. You're doing super well if you're successful enough that some of your values need to be re-written.
- jacobr1 3y ago
  And even then they didn't pivot to "don't break anything." They still are willing to break user workflows are quickly test new features that have a high risk of being rolled back. They key is that they are able to set more explicit tradeoffs on the risk they want to take relative the benefits and what scenarios they want to optimize. The same applies to all engineering disciplines - arguably managing requirements and tradeoffs to produce a working system is what makes something a work of engineering vs another discipline.

stevefan1999 3y ago

> and yet you don't see very many buildings collapse, bridges fail, and damns flood down valley Computers, at its best existed for only 200 years. That's counting from the difference engine that Babbage never finished building, and if we are talking about the first modern computer that does contribute significantly in a way, that's around the time ENVAC and Z3 appeared, just around 80 years. Structural Engineering existed for over 2000 years. With that comes with a lot of people died in natural disasters and advancing material science to improve structural integrity. But even the Japanese to this day still can't solve the earthquake and the problems the fallout makes. > Why this isn't applied to software engineering is a whole nother story I actually think it is. That's why real-time operating system and mission-critical hardware exists for human to fly in the air and explore the space, not counting a lot of time-sensitive industry robotics software that controls the actuators in real time as well. That said, the strict requirements of real-time programming requires a lot of expertise such as CPU cycle counting, CPU slack reduction, timing requirements and choice of algorithm (such as EDF scheduling and real time memory allocators like TLSF, and you won't see jemalloc on embedded devices, right?), stack or heap memory allocation which also complicates the programming stuff, because removing malloc might free you from OOM but this means a lot of functions needs to accept extra parameters to state the output location, and that means a lot of normal software can't be used. (You can go for a hybrid approach by using arena allocation, but that still isn't a perfect solution) As you see, even for soft real time engineering (which I actually mentioned so far, I don't know much about the real hardcore "hard real time engineering" though), the sheer complexity here already, means there's a lot of design decisions which simply just makes people stay away and just go for normal software engineering (but in the end, if everything is predicable its fine). > Move fast and break things is not something i wanted to hear tbh. When Zuckerberg said that, he's referring to his startup mindset when Facebook was really just a startup in his day. In a highly competitive market environment, startups has to fight desperately for their own survival, even with lots of fundings and VC rounds. Startup can move very fast and their agility is the only weapon against the old dogs. Now you've become one of the old dogs, you don't break things.

Macha 3y ago
Also for much of that 2000 years, most bridges that weren't big landmarks were somewhat consumable. It's not uncommon in small towns in Europe to have the bridge from the first half of the twentieth century, built because the nineteenth century bridge washed away in a storm, and that bridge was built because the seventeenth century bridge fell down from lack of maintenance.

PakG1 3y ago

There is something about how buildings, bridges, and damns are tangible and therefore easier for people to conceptualize and appreciate. There is a natural literacy there in that you don't have to understand what goes into making a bridge to understand the consequences of having a bad bridge. Meanwhile, software's inner workings are encapsulated so that they're not self-evident as to consequences if things go awry. Furthermore, software is inconsistent in how it works, and this trains people to think that software is just naturally glitchy, but the glitches aren't a big deal. See the joke about different types of engineers also: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/pqr8t3/four_engineers_get_into_a_car_the_car_wont_start/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/pqr8t3/four_engineer... The mechanical engineer says: “It’s a broken starter” The electrical engineer says: “Dead battery” The chemical engineer says: “Impurities in the gasoline” The IT engineer says: “Hey guys, I have an idea, how about we all get out of the car and get back in” If that's what the IT guy recommends, how do you get users, never mind corporate managers and executives, to take software system quality seriously? Obviously, this isn't what a proper software guy will think, the proper software guy knows that things are a bit more complex than that. But this is what the software guy communicates to non-technical people. And only a few rare non-technical people will tell the software guy, "OK, look, just tell me what's really going on here, how deep the problem is, and what we need to do to fix it, no matter what it takes." Most people won't have the time for that because fact of the matter is that the system satisfices needs until it doesn't, and then it's too late.

mjevans 3y ago
Software is more like blueprints/processes for manufacturing. When something doesn't work right it's a yield rate issue. Oops the process failed, try it again. Software can, and should, also be helpfully smarter. Where there's a chance for invalid inputs, they should be validated. That would help with errors like: * Authentication failed, check your account credentials. * Could not connect to remote server. * Invalid data input, failed to parse around byte/octet 1,234,666, near line 56789 (printable filtered) text: 'Invalid String Example Here' Yes, those are my take on 'software' versions of the starter, battery, and impurity. Lots of well written software will do this, mostly good compilers for software. Poorly written software, often hides these errors if it even collects them at all. PHBs and other less professional people seem allergic to thinking, for them it's easier to call in a specialist or just not do it with the broken tool.

charcircuit 3y ago

It's easier for software to have a catastrophic failure than a building, bridge, or dam. It's not really a fair comparison when those are like easy mode compared to software.

scott_w 3y ago
I don't think it's "easy mode" and more that they're just very different domains. As time goes on, I feel more and more strongly that we shouldn't compare software engineering with other types of engineering at all. My younger brother works in the structural engineering space and the types of issues he's faced across different roles is very different to the types of issues I face in software. Building design and construction have to handle the physical world and dealing with the realities of physically building the structure. Once it's built, however, the occupants don't make drastic changes to the building itself. In comparison, something like Facebook or Twitter needed to change drastically just to remain usable as they grew. "Just stop adding users" isn't a sensible solution to the problem. Just to be clear that I do not excuse the, frankly, shit software design of Horizon and the fucking appalling behaviour of the Post Office throughout this scandal. I do think, however, that comparing software engineering the other types of engineering does a disservice to all and doesn't take us closer to actually improving the craft.
- Verdex 3y ago
  I've got ~15 years of software development under my belt. And I've also experienced a 2ish year stint where I was exposed to a lot of structural engineering. The structural engineers take a piece of steel out into the desert and they dump sand on it until it collapses. Then they divide whatever weight the sand was by 3 and write it down into a book which is then published for all the other structural engineers. This type of steel with this type of configuration with this length can hold up to this much weight. Meanwhile, in software engineering the limiting factor that prevents collapse is often "these sets of constraints and requirements are too complicated for the team to keep track of in their heads in this messy codebase". Not only do we not have a way to test this and publish the results, it's not even obvious what exactly you're even trying to measure. [Cyclomatic complexity isn't very well correlated to defects (iirc lines of code is better correlated). Design patterns, best practices, and code smells are all just poetry that we use to story tell our ways out of blame. And Weyuker's 9 Properties are at best a waste of time. There is currently no way to measure bad code that fails under load until it does so in production.]

thom 3y ago

This is a British scandal, and we’re quite capable of avoiding consequences for malfeasance in every sector of our economy, not just IT thank you very much.

blitzar 3y ago
computer says no
paganel 3y ago
The Grenfell Tower fire comes to mind, as someone was mentioning above how this sort of stuff rarely happens when it comes to buildings and the like. As far as I know there were no real consequences for the people that were directly responsible for that tragedy.
- scott_w 3y ago
  Not only no consequences, it looks like they're trying to cash in by rinsing the occupants for the cost to remove the cladding on similar buildings!
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    They're protecting property owners at every step. Why haven't they condemned large/tall buildings with inadaquate stairwells for fire evacuation (in fact, given the timeline of the fire, Grenfell's single staircase would have been amply adaquate to evacuate the building before people started dying)? Because that would totally hose the people who own such buildings. And why aren't they requiring large buildings to have adaquate staircases? Because that would eat into profitable floorspace. The UK prioritizes property owner profit.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >The UK prioritizes property owner profit. So the US didn't fall far from the tree. It's just like 'daddy'. <wipes away imperial tear>
    - 3y ago

spacechild1 3y ago

For me the biggest joke is that these people call themselves "software engineers" in the first place.

PakG1 3y ago
The unfortunate reality is that everyone else has accepted that they are software engineers. That unfortunately trumps what "real" software engineers think.
lupusreal 3y ago
You've been downvoted by people who value the word "engineer" in their job title even though they haven't earned it. The title is valued because real engineers have earned a great deal of respect through their diligence, and software "engineers" are for the most part parasites leeching off that respect earned by others.
- spacechild1 3y ago
  Yes. I come from a country where 'engineer' (German: 'Ingenieur') is a title with strict requirements by law. You cannot just call yourself 'engineer' without the appropriate degree or certificates. These people have been called 'software developers' or just 'programmers' back in the day. In fact, I'd argue that most commercial software development is more like plumbing than engineering. Here's a hint: if you're writing control software for airplanes, medical devices or industrial plants, you're an engineer; if you're developing a UI frontend for a website, you're probably not.
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    What if it’s a UI/frontend for a website that manages a safety-critical system?
    - spacechild1 3y ago
      Then it might be :)

cornel_io 3y ago

This isn't a story about software engineering, it's a story about a shitty governmental department in a mediocre country not fixing something that everyone knows is broken, and threatening people with jail time instead. Show me a similar story about stuff this bad happening at Google and I'll believe that there's something wrong with the field as practiced at its best.

jack_riminton 3y ago
The wider 'mood music' is also key here; the government was in the process of privatizing the Post Office i.e. so that they weren't the sole equity owner. Every decision (or non-decision, more appropriately) stemmed from that. This is why the CEO was rewarded with a CBE and a cushy NHS post in 2019 when the scandal was in full swing. She was acting like a good girl for her political masters in managing the crisis, stringing it out long enough in the hope that everyone would forget
uconnectlol 3y ago
the software bugged and said they commited fraud, thats still half the problem and is a good time to repeat "stop putting software in things". we still need 40 more years before software "engineers" grow up and start doing things even anything near correctly. the other half of the problem is those people who just want tech for every problem. they just want shiny buttons, regardless of if they work. i dont know why but everything that these companies like fujitsu, hp, dell, acer, asus, sony, samsung, etc are all complete shit. i would vote to remove the government if they told me theyre going to start using some fujitsu product to decide who should go to jail. i just noticed a $6000 vent hood where if you adjust the fan speed you cant toggle the light within the next few seconds. even lay people understand that there is no reason for this aside from what could only be reasonably understood as absolute shit engineering. the problem is people asking idiots who cant program even a simple button, to program serious enterprise, government, and military systems.

arcade79 3y ago

> and yet you don't see very many buildings collapse, bridges fail, and damns flood down valley. Hi! Let me tell you about my wonderful country. Norway! I'm sure you've heard about it. The socialist utopia in Scandinavia! ;-) The Braskereidfoss dam failed during a flood last fall. Luckily just a 'river dam' and not a reservoir dam. Still rather bad. Oh, and during the same freak whether event, but different place in the country. The Randklev railway bridge failed over the river Lågen, just by Ringebu. And during the last 8 years, we've had two road bridges collapse. One by Sjoa in 2016 (Perkolo bridge) and then 16 months ago Tretten bridge. We had the fantastic idea of building wooden bridge sfor road traffic. Here's a nice article on Tretten bridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tretten_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tretten_Bridge But yeah, not too many building collapses . Just a bunch of infrastructure collapse.

where-group-by 3y ago

When a dam or a bridge breaks it is game over. When software breaks you restart and it's back to "working" order. It would be a different scenario if the computer would set itself on fire on failure.

palm-tree 3y ago
Except when it's critical software in an aircraft, nuclear power plant, submarine, financial institution etc etc
- where-group-by 3y ago
  Of course, or something as mundane as BIOS.

ivanhoe 3y ago

> Move fast and break things is not something i wanted to hear tbh. Moving safely means moving slow, and that costs more - it's as simple as that. Plus it would also automatically disqualify like 80% of the workforce, due to the need for a proper formal education and certification, which would literally paralyze the industry. And the current solution is not that different from what we have e.g. in civil engineering, the building codes for high-rise buildings are way more strict and complex than the regulations for a garden shed - in many places no permit is needed at all for it. And sometimes that means that that shad will fall in a catastrophic way, too.

Yoric 3y ago
> Moving safely means moving slow, and that costs more - it's as simple as that. Plus it would also automatically disqualify like 80% of the workforce, due to the need for a proper formal education and certification, which would literally paralyze the industry. Would that be so bad, in the grand scheme of things?
ghaff 3y ago
In the US, professional engineering licenses tend to be required when you're signing off on things for regulators. Which is common in Civil Engineering and Architects; it's not actually that common with Mechanical Engineers and isn't even available any longer for Software. But you're right, it generally requires you have a 4-year degree and have worked under a licensed engineer for some number of years.
- anthk 3y ago
  In Europe it is. At least in potential life endangering environments. Maybe not for a web page for the govermenmt in order to apply for trivial documents such as the national ID; but for stuff like Healthcare backends, any self-called Engineer from the US couldn't even join that project without a Bachelor Degree.
  - brnt 3y ago
    I've worked in this area (in Europe) and that is nonsense. There is no requirement, other thans on the software itself. Bachelor-ish people are generally recruited, but not for their degree, but their skills (and low cost).

fzeindl 3y ago

> Why this isn't applied to software engineering is a whole nother story, but i think it probably should. Because bits don‘t rot and while you need to build a new bridge now and then which will include your learnings from the old one, you never have to replace software because it can be copied ad infinitum.

whyever 3y ago
Metaphorically speaking, bits do rot, this is an expression for software stopping to work as the environment changes over time: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bit-rot.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bit-rot.html

phatfish 3y ago

I think one of the issues is that software engineers are building on sand. Civil engineers have Newton and Einstein to fall back on. It feels like there is no ground truth in computing, each layer has to assume the layer below is generating random errors and try to account for that, because humans are not perfect. The laws of physics stay the same, technology is constantly changing.

jimnotgym 3y ago
When you get trained as a Chartered Engineer/Surveyor/Accountant/Purchaser etc you get schooled in ethics, professionalism, whistle blowing, how to deal with being unfairly pressurised etc. Never mind Newton, professional standards would have really helped here.
uconnectlol 3y ago
yes, and instead of numerical values that can be corrected with straightforward mathematical techniques, you have contracts (API) that are either broken or not, and theres nothing you can do about it, i mean unless you want to write thousands of extra lines of code to account for every combination of the lower layer misbehaving

jimnotgym 3y ago

> and yet you don't see very many buildings collapse, bridges fail, and damns flood down valley. Because those engineers are required to have rigorous qualifications. Please see my comment linked below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39014625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39014625

berniedurfee 3y ago

I always figure the major difference between software engineering and engineering physical things, is that software is virtual and fluid. Once a physical thing is built or being manufactured, the cost of change is exponentially higher than with software. So software engineers can experiment more frequently and can get away with low quality, as it can always be fixed later. Of course, this same mentality can carry into industries where the stakes are life and death, which is where accountability is very much lacking.

xlii 3y ago

I’ll bite. It’s that way because software is much much much more complex than that. Building is a good example. One architect after university has enough knowledge and mental capability to design a building that won’t topple: There are discrete number of parameters to work on and fallible elements are identified and understood very well. There’s manageable amount of degrees of freedom that architect is working with. It’s also not very common for physics to get an annual update. But when you go to funny-cat-pictures.com there are layers upon layers of complexity. There’s TCP, UDP, traffic encryption, indefinite number of hoops in routing, indefinite number of electronic devices with various quality, etc. Request comes happens from millions lines of code operating system and generation happens on a different millions lines of code of operating system with thousands of lines of codes of software code that interacts with databases, proxies, CDNs, load balancers and is templating, serving, translating, transpiling, compiling and serving while defending against adverse attacks, managing the cache, optimizing for network topology and requester rendering software. That changes every single day slightly. In 99% the worst case is - your picture won’t load. But when you get to the more serious software development (in a way that it’s critical domain, not that “serve cat pictures” isn’t serious job, mind you) all of it is very very visible. Every element is so unimaginably complex that it has literal tomes of knowledge written and published about it. Describing every element of transaction between end user and cat serving website would take hundreds of pages - and it would be different than other cat website. Most of the building, bridges etc. was made either by one person or small group of people working on it. Rarely software is written seldom, and many well known products have tens of thousands of inconceivable smart engineers and we still can make fun of their - not so rare - failures. So yeah. Systems suck, organizations suck, people suck. But they suck in relatively safe but also complex environment. For years software engineering was made fun of because it’s not real engineering. But when you look close enough the environment is orders of magnitude more difficult. Civil engineers might be offended but they can’t hold a candle to structures software is keeping straight. Software is a bridge built on a raft, floating on an ocean, which tries to get shot down by armed pirates and semi-controlled by a cost-saving manager trying to look good in annual progress report.

diffeomorphism 3y ago
> Q: Why is the quality of your work worse? > A: Because I am very, very smrt and engineering is for babies. Lol. Sounds like someone was very upset about being called "not a real engineer".

scotty79 3y ago

> and yet you don't see very many buildings collapse, bridges fail, and damns flood down valley Maybe that's survivor bias? Crappy organizations fail at infrastructure projects before they even get off the ground. Conversly softer endeavors involving just money, people and services can operate for a long time on finger crossing.

deanishe 3y ago

> Why this isn't applied to software engineering is a whole nother story, but i think it probably should. Money, for one thing. Actually building the thing IRL is the expensive bit, but it's effectively free for software. So engineers are incentivised to get things right the first time, and software developers are not. It's much cheaper to skimp on QA, let users find your fuck-ups, and push an update.