3 ms·

> What sort of programmer I know we like to think all programmers are the best and brightest and most talented citizens of the entire world, but the truth is:

by seiji 11y ago

> What sort of programmer I know we like to think all programmers are the best and brightest and most talented citizens of the entire world, but the truth is: most programmers have the dedication of fast food workers and as long as "it works for me," they'll ship it. The projects people here are used to (modular, decomposed, open source, documented) are rare. The world is full of multi-million line code bases with little usable documentation (either no documentation, outdated documentation, or 8,000 pages of documentation) and comments not describing actual behavior. Plus, everything gets compiled using 300 recursive Makefiles written across 15 years in 8 different countries by people who only keep their job for 8 months at a time.

railsisfails 11y ago
At least they stick with one tech longer than five minutes. The ADD-riddled folk that sometimes post on here, changing their tech stack based on the newness in milliseconds of the latest craptastic JS framework is astounding.
- seiji 11y ago
  The kids have no cost of switching to something new because they probably don't know much already. As you get older, re-learning everything 6 months feels weird since any random 14 year old can know as much (or more) than you do about the new system. Your API-level experience gets invalidated rapidly, so it's almost better to start from scratch, which only the unknowing youths can do. Then there's a whole "stake you claim" mentality. Want to be the best C person in the world? You can't. It's too wide spread. What to be the best Go person? Sure, fight that battle for your own glory since it's new and you can take part in everything. Lack of education/experience also creates a great breeding ground for new, duplicate, half-implemented versions of things that already exist. The older a developer gets, the more they see things they already know re-implemented as completely new but with unfamiliar interfaces they'll have to re-learn again every 6 months. It's a huge waste of human capacity to always be "new new new" instead of creating a stable and reasonably extensible base to work from. But, at the same time, we don't want to be stuck on Perl 4 and CORBA forever. There's a tradeoff between building new things for advancing the future versus building new things just because you think you're better than all the previous research/experience that has come before you. See the case of Cathedral v. Bazaar.
ISL 11y ago
"Works for me" isn't the only reason to ship imperfect code. Time-to-market really matters in some applications. "Move fast and break things" is a motto for a reason. The router companies shipping NetUSB routers are meeting a market need; people want to plug printers into routers and print from anywhere on their network. For many users and applications, low-quality code will work. It's in the long term that high-quality work differentiates itself.
- seiji 11y ago
  > For many users and applications, low-quality code will work. Oh, don't pretend "quality" is just a proxy for "has pretty animations and makes the user feel warm and fuzzy." The failure to ensure "quality" of this embedded router component has put millions of never-going-to-be-updated hardware devices in the wild at risk of 3rd party takeover, personal information leakage, installing proxies on them to send user details to hostile actors (monetary losses, blackmail), .... Programming errors shouldn't be excused just because we always say "whoops! we'll do better next time!" But, since humans are objectively bad at something as complex as programming, we can't hold people accountable (who wrote it? an intern from 8 years ago? punishing them does no good). We can't hold organizations accountable (recall all the consumer routers!) because public policy doesn't think that way. We're in a weird period of history where companies can get away with great computational damage with no repercussions at all. The market currently _does_ favor "just do whatever and try to fix it later (or not, whatever)," but that doesn't make it right.
  - userbinator 11y ago
    we can't hold people accountable (who wrote it? an intern from 8 years ago? punishing them does no good). We can't hold organizations accountable (recall all the consumer routers!) because public policy doesn't think that way. Contrast that with the completely different approach taken by the aerospace industry, where people and organisations are held accountable; and it has resulted in great reliability overall --- interesting discussion about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569077 We're in a weird period of history where companies can get away with great computational damage with no repercussions at all In critical software for a plane it is literally a matter of life or death, and people are willing to pay much more for that level of quality; but if a consumer router gets exploited, what's the worse that could happen? I think it is important to put the risk into perspective: this is bad, but it's not really a people could get killed sort of thing.

by seiji 11y ago

railsisfails 11y ago

At least they stick with one tech longer than five minutes. The ADD-riddled folk that sometimes post on here, changing their tech stack based on the newness in milliseconds of the latest craptastic JS framework is astounding.

seiji 11y ago
The kids have no cost of switching to something new because they probably don't know much already. As you get older, re-learning everything 6 months feels weird since any random 14 year old can know as much (or more) than you do about the new system. Your API-level experience gets invalidated rapidly, so it's almost better to start from scratch, which only the unknowing youths can do. Then there's a whole "stake you claim" mentality. Want to be the best C person in the world? You can't. It's too wide spread. What to be the best Go person? Sure, fight that battle for your own glory since it's new and you can take part in everything. Lack of education/experience also creates a great breeding ground for new, duplicate, half-implemented versions of things that already exist. The older a developer gets, the more they see things they already know re-implemented as completely new but with unfamiliar interfaces they'll have to re-learn again every 6 months. It's a huge waste of human capacity to always be "new new new" instead of creating a stable and reasonably extensible base to work from. But, at the same time, we don't want to be stuck on Perl 4 and CORBA forever. There's a tradeoff between building new things for advancing the future versus building new things just because you think you're better than all the previous research/experience that has come before you. See the case of Cathedral v. Bazaar.

ISL 11y ago

"Works for me" isn't the only reason to ship imperfect code. Time-to-market really matters in some applications. "Move fast and break things" is a motto for a reason. The router companies shipping NetUSB routers are meeting a market need; people want to plug printers into routers and print from anywhere on their network. For many users and applications, low-quality code will work. It's in the long term that high-quality work differentiates itself.

seiji 11y ago
> For many users and applications, low-quality code will work. Oh, don't pretend "quality" is just a proxy for "has pretty animations and makes the user feel warm and fuzzy." The failure to ensure "quality" of this embedded router component has put millions of never-going-to-be-updated hardware devices in the wild at risk of 3rd party takeover, personal information leakage, installing proxies on them to send user details to hostile actors (monetary losses, blackmail), .... Programming errors shouldn't be excused just because we always say "whoops! we'll do better next time!" But, since humans are objectively bad at something as complex as programming, we can't hold people accountable (who wrote it? an intern from 8 years ago? punishing them does no good). We can't hold organizations accountable (recall all the consumer routers!) because public policy doesn't think that way. We're in a weird period of history where companies can get away with great computational damage with no repercussions at all. The market currently _does_ favor "just do whatever and try to fix it later (or not, whatever)," but that doesn't make it right.
- userbinator 11y ago
  we can't hold people accountable (who wrote it? an intern from 8 years ago? punishing them does no good). We can't hold organizations accountable (recall all the consumer routers!) because public policy doesn't think that way. Contrast that with the completely different approach taken by the aerospace industry, where people and organisations are held accountable; and it has resulted in great reliability overall --- interesting discussion about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9569077 We're in a weird period of history where companies can get away with great computational damage with no repercussions at all In critical software for a plane it is literally a matter of life or death, and people are willing to pay much more for that level of quality; but if a consumer router gets exploited, what's the worse that could happen? I think it is important to put the risk into perspective: this is bad, but it's not really a people could get killed sort of thing.