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Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

For instance, consider the poor souls whose work entails implementing the ubiquitous feature of automatic phone systems: when you call about a bill or service issue, you have to speak your name into a computer system; once you’ve articulated “speak to an agent” some 16 times to said computer system, waited 20 additional minutes, and finally reached a human being, you immediately have to provide the same information you already gave the system.

So funny and so true. With respect to software development, I've worked on so many projects that were cancelled before ever being released. Built e-commerce and warehouse systems for a $300M company that went bankrupt. Millions of lines of code just disappeared. It's hard to take software development seriously after experiencing this a few times.

This profession is a money grab, get what you can while you can get it, before the bubble bursts. Surely developer salaries are in a bubble, right?

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The quote you provide shows a breakdown in process, not software. Wherever this human being is, they do not have access to the information provided beforehand (lack of communication between human software and phone software), did not look/can't find it (lack of training), or they have to go through a checklist of processes regardless of information provided (managers don't trust the phone system to do the job right).

Either way, I do not understand your correlation between that quote and how your lines of code disappear - as with all things, when a company does, sometimes so do the products they offer - there is nothing different here.

The correlation is if you spend months or years working on something that has no value or that immediately ceases to exist, then your job is BS.

Doesn't that mean you were providing a service instead of creating a product?

So does that mean the scientists and astronauts that worked on Space Shuttle Challenger had a BS job?

Arguably the entire shuttle program was BS. It was a huge white elephant for NASA: prodigiously expensive, saddled with impractical requirements by the Air Force, and producing negligible new scientific results compared to the unmanned probes.

Oh really. The whole point is to figure out ways of inhabiting outer space. The " negligible" results gave such silly things like advanced radiation shielding, thermal clothing, advanced air filtering, developments in radioisotope generators and solar panels, material science, even project planning (though saddled with bureaucracy).

What it did not improve is the cost of space travel.

I happen to agree with both you and the parent. You both have a valid point. It's not as bad as the parent implied; it's still quite bad.

Speaking to the parent's bubble salary point. You've seen the salaries being offered to Magento developers? Perhaps the easiest six figures you can make in tech. In exchange, you have to work with a giant flaming pile of software trash that shouldn't exist in the first place.

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