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Yes! In my last role, I aggressively pushed the concept of “technical risk” to try and get people used to this idea. Sometimes the computers don’t work the way

Yes! In my last role, I aggressively pushed the concept of “technical risk” to try and get people used to this idea. Sometimes the computers don’t work the way you thought they did at the beginning. This is a normal and ubiquitous form of risk that just needs to be managed like any other type of risk, with prototypes, multiple revisions of the implementation (each introducing additional risk), occasionally re-scoping, etc. People outside engineering sometimes don’t like it because the risk is human in origin—it comes from engineers not knowing things, and our job is to know things—but until there’s an omniscient engineer, this risk will continue to exist.

rixed 2y ago
Yes, this fits my experience as well. Oftentimes I've heard people who are not and have never been software engineers ask "When we want to built a bridge, engineers can tell how long it will take and how expensive it will be, how come with software engineers it's never the case?" (often implied: you software engineers have it easy, slackers! -- I believe we put this blame on ourselves with our immature culture, but that's another discussion) What I usually answer to that is that, to begin with, that if they had actually dealed with big construction projects like bridges then they would not idealize those so much. And secondly, that this is not the right analogy. Bridge construction is a much stabler science, it had no "complexity explosion". A better analogy would be geophysical prospection : the theory it's based on is sound and mature but the unknowns dominate everything in predicting the outcome.
- msteffen 2y ago
  If you haven’t seen it (and need something to show the “what about bridges” crew), Hillel Wayne’s “crossover project” series of posts[^1] on this is brilliant. I like to show people this quote from it: > One person talked about how frustrating it is to start work on a bridge foundation, only to find that this particular soil freezes in a weird way that makes it liquefy too much in an earthquake. Back to the drawing board. [^1]: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/we-are-not-special/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/we-are-not-special/

rixed 2y ago

Yes, this fits my experience as well. Oftentimes I've heard people who are not and have never been software engineers ask "When we want to built a bridge, engineers can tell how long it will take and how expensive it will be, how come with software engineers it's never the case?" (often implied: you software engineers have it easy, slackers! -- I believe we put this blame on ourselves with our immature culture, but that's another discussion) What I usually answer to that is that, to begin with, that if they had actually dealed with big construction projects like bridges then they would not idealize those so much. And secondly, that this is not the right analogy. Bridge construction is a much stabler science, it had no "complexity explosion". A better analogy would be geophysical prospection : the theory it's based on is sound and mature but the unknowns dominate everything in predicting the outcome.

msteffen 2y ago
If you haven’t seen it (and need something to show the “what about bridges” crew), Hillel Wayne’s “crossover project” series of posts[^1] on this is brilliant. I like to show people this quote from it: > One person talked about how frustrating it is to start work on a bridge foundation, only to find that this particular soil freezes in a weird way that makes it liquefy too much in an earthquake. Back to the drawing board. [^1]: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/we-are-not-special/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/we-are-not-special/