Software is a long con

Hmm — fake analogy. Bridge fall down would be more on the scale of, a software install stopped all service permanently, self erased, and could never be restarted.

Real software quality issues are more like re paving, painting, new cables, scraping off rust, closing for inspection — and slow commute traffic over the bridge.

Argument by analogy is just sophistry, the real argument is to precisely account for the total economic cost of defects, and what the cost would be to correct them. But that is a lot more effort than I have ever seen in a blog post.

“Hey guys!” he said. “So it looks like there’s a crew of Russian bridge destroyers with hammers and lighters who are running around in the middle of the night setting fires to bridges and knocking off braces with hammers. They started in Ukraine but they’re spreading around the world now, and we don’t know if our bridges are safe. They’ve studied bridges carefully and they seem to be good at finding where they’re most flammable and which braces to knock off with their hammer.”

Computer software does not exist in isolation; it is built upon layers and layers of abstractions, starting from hardware and ending with your framework/language of choice, resulting in a system so complex that no person alive is able to grok it in it's entirety. Bugs can be found in any of these hundreds of separate but interoperating layers, and no entity it's going to assume full liability for this entire construct.

A better analogy would be if the bridge was interconnected with every other piece of infrastructure in it's environment, from the buildings in vicinity to the ground it's built on, and all of these were in continuous shift and transformation. No sane engineer would take full responsibility for designing and building such a bridge.

And I haven't even touched on the subject of money and it's implications. "Whereas physics is math with the constraint of reality, software engineering is math with the constraint of money."

The argument falls apart when you ask: are you willing to pay 10 times as much (or start paying something at all) to use your software.

Software development is an economic activity, and as long as there are incentives to ship first with the most functionality regardless of quality, we will continue to ship insecure and broken software.

Don't blame the engineers, blame the system.

> OK, obviously it’s not bridges I’m talking about, it’s software.

Actually, you're talking about neither but are merely trying to create a narrative.

Too many words. Try communicating the point as succinctly as you possibly can.