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feral

Contarian opinion:

We are great at software engineering, and our field is the best at engineering generally.

Engineering isn't about how reliable or high quality the system is.

Engineering is about balancing the costs and the benefits.

It can be great engineering to make a running shoe that wears out after 2 races, if it wins marathons.

People who think software engineering is bad, are actually bad engineers, who think engineering is all about quality or reliablity, rather than about optimizing tradeoffs. Software engineering is doing an amazing job at producing products that balance cost and benefit, which is why software is eating the world.

Engineers from traditional disciplines would struggle here, because it's a lot easier to follow super expensive tried and true process, than to situationally make tradeoffs like we do.

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Yet software engineers sometimes fail at actually implementing that balance.

> It can be great engineering to make a running shoe that wears out after 2 races, if it wins marathons.

Sure, but it is bad engineering if it fails halfway through the first marathon and injures your runner. See Iowa. Nobody is complaining about the fact that tradeoffs are made (strawman), what people are complaining about it is that software engineers make tradeoffs unknowingly/don't understand what they are doing.

This is the difference between "we built a bridge that will last two years, because that is all we need" and "To our surprise the bridge already failed after two years, whoops".

facebook did ~$70B in revenue with ~$24B in profit, which implies that it spent about ~$40B to keep itself running, for a year.

The Big Dig cost ~20B over the course of a decade. The Apollo Program clocks in at ~25B The Large Hadron Collider at a svelte 10B.

Software isn't cheap it's just that no one pays attention to the costs.

Facebook is an outlier monopoly, having successfully privatized a massive commons, so I'm not sure their ability to spend 40B a year proves much of anything. (If those figures are even the right lens.)

As a counterpoint, Wikipedia's operating costs are ~40M a year, 1000 times less, and I know which one I'd rather keep!

> having successfully privatized a massive commons

They created the commons.

It didn't exist before and several companies tried to do what they did. They all failed. MySpace had a huge head start. Didn't matter. Everyone shit on the Instagram acquisition for $1B when it was first reported and years afterwards (in fact Zuck made the decision without even consulting the board and right before a risky IPO where the public was sure to take it as a negative signal). He saw the value and invested in it. Today Instagram is a $100B entity that does more revenue than YouTube.

Credit where credit is due.

That’s not to say there aren’t issues. There obviously are and they’re well documented.

How many people use those projects? What a weird comparison

Probably because the profits are in line with the cost.

I agree. Engineering is all about trade offs. Software let’s us make different trade offs because it’s so easy to update and fix your mistakes. It would be a poor engineer that didn’t take advantage of that.

I will give you one thing. We iterate faster. We can try a dozen number of approaches in a week and often we get immediate feedback on what works and what doesn't work. I hardly doubt any other kind of engineer has tried as many things as any of us do. We build, and build and build. We don't spend a lot of time building one thing. Or if we build one thing it is made of many things that we build, rebuild, refactor and replace over and over.

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