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Bloomber's Odd Losts podcast had two episodes on the general topic (Jan 2023), "Why Corporate America Still Runs on Ancient Software That Breaks": > Southwest

Bloomber's Odd Losts podcast had two episodes on the general topic (Jan 2023), "Why Corporate America Still Runs on Ancient Software That Breaks": > Southwest Airlines had a disastrous holiday season, thanks in part to a software bug that left crews out of place and grounded thousands of flights. But Southwest isn't alone in having software in the headlines lately. The New York Stock Exchange recently had a software error that caused weird pricing on stocks and the FAA had its own computer issue that grounded planes earlier this month. So what's the deal with corporate software? Why do these crashes happen? And why does the user experience typically leave something to be desired? On this episode of the podcast we speak with Patrick McKenzie, an expert on engineering and infrastructure, who writes the Bits About Money newsletter and recently left payments company Stripe after six years. We talked about the challenges of keeping any software system alive after years of upgrades and updates, the distribution of tech talent across industries, and whether non-tech companies can close the gap with Silicon Valley. * https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/why-corporate-america-still-runs-on-ancient-softwa https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/why-corporate-america-still-r... * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6UQaXpzwQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6UQaXpzwQA "This Is What Happens When Governments Build Software" (Jun 2023): > There's a lot of frustration about the government's ability to build things in the US. Subways. Bridges. High-speed rail. Electricity transmission. But there's another crucial area where the public sector often struggles, and that is software. We saw it with the infamous rollout of Obamacare. We see it in the UX of the Treasury Direct website. And we saw it in the way state unemployment insurance systems broke during the pandemic. So why is it so hard for the public sector to build and maintain software? On this episode we speak with Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and former executive director of Code for America and author of the new book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, as well as Dave Guarino, who recently left the Department of Labor after working on upgrading the unemployment insurance system. Both have a long history of working on public sector software systems and they explain why the problem is so tricky. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMtOv6DFn1U One large component is that a lot of business rules and policies have been encoded into the software logic, and (re-)translating that into code in a new(er) language is part of the challenge.

RaftPeople 2y ago
> One large component is that a lot of business rules and policies have been encoded into the software logic, and (re-)translating that into code in a new(er) language is part of the challenge. It's a massive challenge. It's like a little city that has been growing for 5 decades with a new lot of houses here, a new road there, utilities routed over there, etc. Then someone saying "let's re-do this city about 10 miles that way". With a city it's easy to see the magnitude of the problem. With large software systems it's not.

RaftPeople 2y ago

> One large component is that a lot of business rules and policies have been encoded into the software logic, and (re-)translating that into code in a new(er) language is part of the challenge. It's a massive challenge. It's like a little city that has been growing for 5 decades with a new lot of houses here, a new road there, utilities routed over there, etc. Then someone saying "let's re-do this city about 10 miles that way". With a city it's easy to see the magnitude of the problem. With large software systems it's not.