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Just wait till you learn that law isn’t really law. I once worked on an OSS project for 8 municipalities to handle employee work related driving. The Danish tax
by devjab 2y ago
Just wait till you learn that law isn’t really law. I once worked on an OSS project for 8 municipalities to handle employee work related driving. The Danish tax law on the area is short and the simplest law text I’ve ever read, and we implemented it as such. Only to find out that the 8 cities interpreted this short piece or law in more than 8 different ways. Yes, even within the same admin they didn’t agree on how it should be interpreted. Some of the lawyers even got in heated discussions because they felt the other were breaking the law.
Anyway it wasn’t till later in the process where one of the lawyers who didn’t seem to have a whole lot of fucks to give explained it to me at the coffee machine. Basically our tax agency decides which interpretation is correct, but you don’t actually have to be correct until they directly tell you that you’re wrong. Which often won’t ever happen as virtually every organisation in the country handles employee driving and there are only five members of the tax agency doing check ups.
- Jolter 2y agoSounds like your software, if programmed the way you wanted, would have unified it all to one single interpretation of the law. Then you would have put a few lawyers out of work… No wonder they shot it down!
- devjab 2y agoTechnically there is only one. Our tax agency happened to actually audit one city, and then all the others after it was revealed that the first one did indeed break the law.
- djtango 2y agoThis is essentially why social trust is so important especially in non-authoritarian systems
- ozim 2y agoI think this is why lots of software projects fail - not because they are wrong - but it is just not what people want (and people might want things that are not according to the law ;) ). Then if it rubs the wrong way people who are in power then even if your project is technically right it gets canned and they blame developers on not delivering :( I can see it in business software I work on. Interesting part is "required fields", someone makes 10-20 fields required on a form to fill in - but then people start complaining it takes too much time and why they have to fill in those fields and managers of those people come over complaining that software sucks ... well, great but we did not make the requirements, that was company/customer that wanted that.
- devjab 2y agoWe incorporated all the different ways they wanted as feature flagged options. Then it was very easy to remove them when they asked us to do that. I get where you come from though. What we tend to do is to stage/gate things so that different teams have different required fields. Sometimes the same team depending on the process. Sometimes all the fields are optional until the “status” of a project needs to go forward, so that they can create a project with very little info but can’t actually pass it on to the next team until they have the required data. Of course it’s not exactly a magical solution to angry managers and internal corporate politics but it helped us.
- ozim 2y agoMagical solution would be filling in data from open sources or from that customer CRM. But it is question who will pay for that - we as SaaS don’t want to invest in what single customer uses. Customer expects we do it within their SaaS subscription. End result is that it sucks for people on the ground using it having to copy over data.