Hacker News Reader

I sense a fair amount of the No True Scotsman fallacy going on in your comment--you're arguing that there's no fundamental issue at software engineering, only evil management oppressing engineers from unleashing perfect software. But, I suspect that we are so bad at our jobs that we build broken stuff all the time and merely blame our users for not knowing that everything is broken. (Try putting a space in your home directory and see how much stuff breaks.)

Heartbleed should be the equivalent of the Kansas City Hyatt disaster for our profession. It is a failure mode that is so elementary, so obvious, so easily avoidable that its occurrence should be a sign of deep failure in several processes meant to avoid it, and it should be grounds to open an investigation into criminal negligence. And yet... OpenSSL had no process for catching this stuff. Very few software projects do--I suspect yours do not either.

> Decision making about software is SO bad, so awful, so hideous we try not to think about it lest it rots our minds with despair.

And to add the icing to your cake, more often than not there are no consequences for those making these bad decisions.

> And to add the icing to your cake, more often than not there are no consequences for those making these bad decisions.

Not for the folks making the bad decisions, anyway.

It's funny how many engineers, especially in Silicon Valley, presume themselves apolitical and above such petty social concerns, when the process of making software is itself intensely political.

> when the process of making software is itself intensely political

How is making software more political than doing maths?

Well after just having a 5 hour meeting discussing what exactly constitutes the Presentation Layer vs the Application Layer and debating about whether Authentication counts as business logic in the presentation tier, I can tell you for certain it is Political at times.

You're talking about writing code.

The gp is talking about: requirements; allocating budget between research, salaries, testing, development, support, marketing, exec's pockets, shareholder's pockets, etc.; decisions about which standards to support or not; agreements with other firms; etc. etc. etc.

Software is the automation of processes. Processes are intensely political, because they effect the world.

So by political, I'm conflating two meanings. A lot of Silicon Valley techies are apolitical in a sense of against government intervention, believing that science and their own rationality would be able to do better than the social institutions and powers-that-be. That sort of ideology is fine to have, but I suspect the same mindset can lead to neglect of the politics informed by the second meaning, which simply refers to the practice of negotiating, group-work, wheeling-and-dealing; in that sense you can also call it "business" decisions.

Creating software, whether in a corporation or in an open source project, is more often than not a process that involves many stakeholders, processes, and yes irrational traditions or even "religious" ideology (spaces vs. tabs, etc.). So any time you have more than one person writing a program, things will get political. The decisions behind software-making is a political process.

Mathematics, in contrast, is probably not political except in the higher levels of academia.

> So any time you have more than one person writing a program, things will get political.

I agree with you that the software industry seems to struggle more with these kinds of political issues.

However, there are many human endeavours that also require input from large numbers of stake holders and they seem to cope (i.e. going to the moon, building a bridge, building a skyscraper etc.).

That suggests the problem is not so much the large number of stake holders, but rather the software industry struggling to cope with situations requiring large numbers of stakeholders.

Quality on the initial revision of Apollo Program hardware and software wasn't great. They did as well as they could given the constraints at the time. But there were numerous failures along the way, and several missions survived mostly through blind luck.

>...apolitical in a sense of against government intervention, believing that science and their own rationality would be able to do better than the social institutions and powers-that-be.

That's an explicitly political position.

You’re not wrong, but some don’t realize that. Choosing not to play is a move.

Math may not be political. Often it’s the input to the math that’s political.

Besides, the software engineering process is full of political decisions. What does an “unbiased” search engine mean? When you build a recommendation service, do you intentionally reinforce bias of the user or expose the user to other points of view? How do you define and handle abuse of your service? I could go on and on.

The Manhattan project and the Apollo project both contained a lot of maths and were also highly political.

Hell, just being put in tech lead position and having to juggle engineers’ opinions tells me just how much of a minefield we’re in.

Promotions aren't consequences?

Your suggestions are terrible and would make the situation worse. There are no "proper CS & IT credentials" which can qualify someone to do oversight. In particular most Computer Science degree programs don't cover any relevant material.

And what even counts as "software engineering"? If I want to write a VBA script in my spreadsheet am I supposed to ask some anointed expert for approval? It's just ridiculous and totally unworkable.

There are no proper accounting credentials. Anyone can call themselves an accountant. An accounting degree or CPA is not in itself qualification to do oversight. Audit committees don't solve everything either. Still seem to be worthwhile.

If you are running a fortune 500 company and your vba spreasheet is a material expenditure in your financial statements then YES get it approved by the IT committee. (If you get a vampire-squid consultancy to build it for you it probably will be too!) Non-material expenditure? No, who cares if it's not material? (Material has a GAAP definition and is deemd to be something like 5% of the balance of the asset or liabiltiy or impact more than 5% of revenue or expenses). Someone who has studied more recently than me can probably tell us what GAAP says is material for audit purposes.

> There are no proper accounting credentials. Anyone can call themselves an accountant.

This is not true everywhere. In my country, accounting is regulated [0] and can only be performed by credentialled professionals, registered on the Federal Council of Accountants.

[0] http://www.portaldecontabilidade.com.br/legislacao/resolucao...

A CPA specifically is qualification to do oversight. CPAs do occasionally fail in their oversight role but that's the exception, not the norm.

> Next have someone qualified on every single board of directors and have each board create an appropriate sub committee. The same way you have a qualified accountant and audit sub-comittee.

I think it makes sense to note that corporations don't adhere to GAAP voluntarily, or because it makes good business sense. They do it because they will be de-listed from stock exchanges and shut down by the government if they do not.

The stock exchanges won't do this for "tech malpractice." From a financial standpoint, tech malpractice is just another calculated risk. Versus financial malpractice, which creates an unlevel playing field on the stock exchange itself. And history has shown that the fallout from "tech malpractice" ends up costing comparatively low dollar amounts anyway.

This leaves me at: this won't improve without government regulation.

> This leaves me at: this won't improve without government regulation.

On the other hand, lack of government regulation has tended towards software costing $0.00 and very rapid evolution and innovation.

$0 software? Have you ever heard of Washington? The word "Enterprise"?

But the point is taken. So what proportion of $0 software, rapid evolution and innovation has come out of vampire-squid consultancies and their billion dollar revenue streams?

The upper limit of my estimate is 0%.

Having an IT committee on the board of directors is a pretty light regulation. Start with the banks. Your money is just bits on their disk.

Just having some people who get fired when the project costs a billion and fails is useful.

> And history has shown that the fallout from "tech malpractice" ends up costing comparatively low dollar amounts anyway.

Disagree. The cost is instead pushed to the consumer.

How many man hours were involved in fixing HeartBleed?

How much time/money have people lost due to security/tech malpractice at Equifax?

I've never been in a position where _lives_ were on the line, but I have been on projects where bugs would cost the company real money. The engineering mindset changes quickly.

Just because the company found a clever way to shift the cost off their balance sheet doesn't mean it's gone. It's just been hidden.

> You can't discuss software in this context without discussing IBM global services, oracle, computer associates, accenture etc etc.

> Shut them all down, watch the average quality of software improve dramatically, immediately.

This is naive. All of those organizations hire extremely smart people and pay them well.

The issue isn't them existing; instead, it's companies wanting "bodies" of developers/operators at the lowest price, hundreds of millions of folks in more impoverished areas willing to answer the call, regardless of the stipulations, and this being extremely profitable when done at scale. Blame executives continuing to think that tech is a cost to be optimized, not an investment to care for.

This pendulum is starting to swing in the other direction (paying for quality not quantity), but it's a slow adjustment.

Accidenture has a vested interest in their products' failure, lest we forget. If they were to hire smart people, that would just make them even more dangerous.

Well, in my experience this is equally (or even more) dangerous. I've seen when the engineers take over and it turns out that they are not necessarily better (at least not 100% good) at "simple" things such as estimating within a 10-20% bounds and similar things - even in organizations that are supposed to have some of the best of them. Rather, in organizations that believe in this kind of thinking (if we could just get rid of management and do it ourselves we'd be so much better off - kind of reminds me of NIH-syndrome) are typically worse off. It's like people who don't believe they are susceptible to ads - they are generally the ones most susceptible....

Yes but .. huh? How many developers claim to be good at estimation if not for their managers?

My experience has been that devs would much rather not make estimates because they know they can't do it, and when their management is itself made of engineers, they aren't asked to. Engineering-led businesses find other ways to avoid the need for estimates.

The problem with software is "copying is free". So old shit does not die, because it is cheap, it is used also in new programs.

It would not surprise me if firing 75% of working programmers would have a net result of more, higher quality software being created.

Possibly, the other half is convincing management that some developers are really worth 2-3x as much.

Just having 4x less people to communicate with would be a net positive, so I’d be happy with that even if we didn’t get a raise :P

... unless, of course, it's management deciding to fire the engineers in the top 75% salary band.

Which they would be inclined to do given this scenerio.

I'm not even sure that wouldn't be a net improvement. There are a hell of a lot of people not doing much besides increasing communication overhead and friction and bikeshedding.

Firing most of middle managers is required too.

>Next have someone qualified on every single board of directors and have each board create an appropriate sub committee. [...] Have someone with proper CS & IT credentials and an IT oversight comittee.

And let me guess, the sub-committee should have its own sub-committee, to hold meetings to prepare for the meetings to prepare for the meetings?

It reminds me of the company (which one? Philips?) which got so fed up with these people that it put all of them in a new department. Then, they got to hold their meetings and the rest got to do their work and everyone got along.

Interesting you think IBM global services, oracle, computer associates, accenture are making low quality software.

Which company is making good Quality software in your view?

Well at the risk of being flippant if you don't know what good quality software looks like, you probably work for, with or on behalf of these vampire-squid-consultancies. Or you have no business having an opinion about it or trying to form one. Really. It's as pointless as forming opinions about who is a good contemporary composer if you've been deaf since birth.

Look at all the successful startups disrupting industry by writing software. Note the total lack of vampire-squid consultancy in their codebase.

Look at the public service orders of magnitude cost blowouts and non-functionality that is the norm. Look at the domination of vampire-squid consultancies right there.

It's really not difficult to see unless you're determined to keep your eyes shut. The vampire-squid consultancies should not exist and are a symptom and proof of the prevalence of misallocation of resource in decisions made by the wholly ignorant.

99% with you, but the vampire-squid consultancies came into being on the backs of market participants trading bank notes for software, and continue to exist on a steady supply of bucks for bugs.

So what did they do right, and what are they continuing to do right other than infecting large organizations with their blood sucking tentacles in a manner which closely resembles a Hokusai woodblock-print and removing some of the favored organs of the management end of the org chart that to be honest, they probably weren’t using anyway?

They are a symptom of the resource allocation being performed by those who are wholly ignorant. They exploit this. Viciously and mercilessly. They should not exist. They would not exist if the people making the resource allocation decision, ie senior management and boards of directors were competent to make the decisions with tens, hundreds even thousands of millions of dollars at stake. The con is on. It's much easier to con the ignorant and they do. Moreover they actually mercilessly attack, undermine and destabilise anyone working in the public service or fortune 500 co.s who might actually have enough of a clue to get in their way.

It has nothing to do with Hokusai.

Excusing vampire-squid consultancies on the basis that the conditions are ideal for their horror is simply unconscionable.

They are a disgrace to our industry. They desperately, desperately need everyone to believe "We are bad at sofware engineering" to continue their con. But we are NOT. We can do software engineering and have done it well, so many times, so publically with such spectacular success disrupting powerful incumbants from the garage with nothing more than software. We will continue to do so. Who is next? You? Me? Absolutely not anyone hiring a vampire squid. Guaranteed.

They are just horrible to deal with.

I get rafted in as a vendor for part of a package that several of them offer to Fortune 500s. They provide negative value - it would be massively easier if I could just hook up directly with the end-customer's IT and do what needed to be done with competent people who know their job and what they want. But I have to play telephone through two or three layers of project managers in Delhi and Bangalore and an ever-shifting array of other people of indeterminate status and role.

> Look at all the successful startups disrupting industry by writing software.

You seem to be equating 'disrupting an industry' with (high) quality software. Could you please elaborate how this holds?

I would also appreciate examples of high quality software, I don't care about the impact of said software.

If you raise an issue and a few days later they update with a fix, then it's probably good.

You're never going to see that from IBM. You will get an email from a marketing team telling about all the other services you may enjoy.

If you've ever worked with any of these companies, you know they make terrible software. They just don't have the incentive structure to be otherwise.

Only one company I ever worked at was making decent quality software, and that was a small consultancy.

Something about this vision struck me as dystopian.