Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

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The problem I have with this perspective is that it ignores all the times software works correctly (which is easy to do, because it's usually invisible.) Consider the pile of software that has to go right for you to experience the world as you do on a given day. Did you buy something from the store? Software. Did your trash get taken from the curb? Software. Did you get to work safely in your car? Software.

I've often had a contrarian view on this in that I find it almost miraculous how robust software is despite all the flaws in the humans creating it and the insanity of what is actually happening physically to make it work. The fact I can type this out and send it and it will work at all is truly stunning. The fact we live in a world where we are surprised when complex, interconnected, global-scale software breaks and not surprised when it somehow works properly speaks volumes.

That's not to say that we can't do better, but the evolution of software to me has been one clearly of improvement, not stagnation or regression, all while taking on more responsibility, more scale, and more problem complexity. It's easy to point back at simpler times as "the good old days when software was well engineered" but it's easy to overlook the daily wonders that we take for granted today that were unconcievable just years ago.

True, and this bias also applies to a bunch of other day to day things that we take for granted.

For the comedic view on this: "Louis CK Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUBtKNzoKZ4

There's a limit though. In particular, if you're long enough in this business, you can look at the failure and quite reasonably guess whether it was a case of miracle occasionally breaking, or someone's stupidity (or greed). The former is excusable, the latter isn't.

In the world of computers, the hardware IS amazing and I'm really happy about it. What makes me sad is how rarely software uses that hardware even to within 1 order of magnitude of its' potential.

I'm not asking for hand tuned assembly everywhere ladies and gents, just get within 10x of what the hardware can do before you ship, please! Even if you think "oh its just some chat software who cares" I care! The waste adds up.

I have worked with electrical engineers, and things are very similar over there.

Little sad story: my zenbook's SSD died 4 times; the last time it was past warranty and they wanted $250 for the replacement (proprietary port). Got a zenbook / sata switch from aliexpress, never buying macbook copycats again.

I swear I was initially going to whine about "we should make it easier to make good software", not about "software is bad") Got carried away a tad, will try better next time!

When society expects systems to work 100% of the time and they work 98% of the time the end result is often worse than if society expected 95% success from a system that has exactly that reliability.

Why? No mitigations/redundancy/workarounds and spoiled plans.

Example. My last job had mostly automated provisioning process and you could not do anything for the first 3 days. My current job is at a smaller company that has manual provisioning and you can get started within first couple hours.

It really comes down to whether the process allows manual overrides, and how difficult it makes them.

Some automated systems completely lock humans out of the process, so it turns into Brazil.

> Did your trash get taken from the curb? Software.

Simply planning the route in advance with path finding or something more? Garbage collection was around and not very different before software was prevalent.

But it took hundreds of people hours of mind-numbing planning sessions to do it back then. And they were humans, they did screw it up every once in a while.

Maybe I've underestimsted it, but "good enough" route planning didn't sound that hard - just looking at a map of customers, dividing into regions with roughly the same amount of customers, and tracing reasonable-looking paths through them.

Imagine yourself tracing a set of paths that covered every street in a large metropolis, obeyed traffic orientation in every street, and were readable by others.

No further Requirements. As many or as few paths as you'd like, no worries about efficiency, sure you can go through the same streets many times if it helps. But needs to cover every street, obey orientation, and be readable by others.

Does not sound easy, does it?

Now, let's add a few more Requirements...

Do you have any source of people spending hours planning garbage pick-up routes and how that has changed with software?

I pay for my trash online. They provide bins. There's two systems right there.

I agree!!! Software does 10,000 things correctly. Then people complain when one thing doesn't work 100% perfectly.

...which can often be "the hotel I booked doesn't have the reservation, and I'm currently SOL". My wife and I booked a rental car for a trip through one of the many booking sites (Expedia, probably) and when we got there, the company that had been booked with was gone and they didn't have our reservation because it was a totally new company. But nothing told us about that, we only learned about it when we got there. Thankfully, people are generally understanding and they were able to get us a car for the same price, but my wife basically had a panic attack due to there being other mishaps on the way. (and she's the type of person who plans things months in advance and changes to the plan are very distressing to her)

So yes, "one thing" might go wrong out of the 10,000, but that "one thing" can cause a literal panic attack. I don't have sympathy for companies that create crappy software that barely limps along and causes a lot of distress to my wife over stuff like that, or not telling us we need to pay extra to book seats on an airplane in advance to be able to sit together for a 13 hours flight. No sympathy at all.

However, you chose to book Expedia over other companies with better software and inventory management (I believe the one I work for handles this kind of thing better than Expedia for example).

So, all things being equal, price beats good software...

That's called counter-party risk. It should factor into your equation when booking something. This is the precise reason I only book with the 'big national brands' because a disruption to my trip is not worth the savings of going with a less reputable outfit.

Yes, it's nice that some software works pretty well most of the time.

However: the use of software and the dependence on software have increased so much, that according to my guesstimations it's almost guaranteed for someone to encounter a software annoyance or have a software-related incident perhaps at least once per day and be involved at least in one major software-related screw-up per year.

And these numbers will only go up as software systems become more connected and intertwined with our lives. From that perspective, software in general is not good enough and people are correct to complain.

The only thing I'd add is that it's not just software. Humans are hardwired to focus on the negative. We miss things working well everywhere.

If you do everything perfect, it's a completely thankless job.

People think for some reason that their job is hard, so when all works perfect that's almost a miracle and others shouldn't be so grumpy when it doesn't. But the moment they are on the customer side they think "that's easy, why doesn't this work?" and ignore how often they rolled their eyes at the same clueless comment about their job.

It's always easy from the outside. Not so much if you are in the trenches yourself.

Agreed. And as bad as software is, humans are worse. Imagine how many things would go wrong if everything had to be done manually.

Are they? Do you have any evidence that lost/overbooked bookings are decreased on software-based booking systems?

SO true

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