Case in point, higher salaries for new hires without deep knowledge, and lack of retention salaries for those who have years of history with systems.
Another example, getting contracted consulting developers to build business critical systems, without locking in retainer arrangements to ensure continuity of deep support knowledge.
If companies incentivized retention with realistic paths to better compensation and growing your career, they'd see lower turn over with these systems.
There's a reason that in recent times there were newsworthy stories about companies giving out retention bonuses and salary increases when some sticks started to plateau / lose value (and therefore RSUs not retaining value), because its relatively rare
A lot of businesses treat software like copiers; they don't want to build it (because they don't consider themselves "tech"). And for a lot of the developers that make or maintain this software, there is little incentive to build it to last.
This is just an unfortunate reality, and its true beyond even tech. I have a few friends with MBA's (accountants / finance) and they say similar things about their jobs too, switching every few years to get better compensation and once their growth starts to plateau they just rinse and repeat.
There are many ongoing treatments in the medical industry, and dare I say it, active suppression of permanent cures.
There are also massive side effects to many of the medical industries treatments. Ie medicine 1 alleviates condition 1, while causing condition 2 in the future. Basically making their own business at the cost of human misery.
There's massive cognitive dissonance in this situation, and most doctors never think about it that way. But people whose lives have been reduced to ongoing suffering through the system certainly have. It's not a cynical take even, it's a realistic take without the rose coloured glasses.
Note this is not saying there aren't benefits or useful features to medical industry treatments. Just that there are also anti-features, and the market incentives have created the situation we have, instead of much better and humane treatments which would be possible without the financial incentives of the medical industry.
Exactly right. At Credit Suisse I asked questions of the back-office people regarding the proposed interface that were to use it and notionally understanding it, such as:
- what are you going to do with it?
- how are you going to access it?
- why are you going to access it?
- what's the security to it?
And so on, to no avail. I had really long given up being a systems analyst, but I had to start again, to little avail.
And I had the full (crap) SWIFT message documentation. God help us if we try to bring Putin down via this route.
"There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it — the horror of it, Sura said — was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex — and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely … the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.
So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge.
“We should rewrite it all,” said Pham.
“It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation.
“It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what — even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.”
Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy …
… And he learned something about mature programming environments that Sura had never quite said. When systems depended on underlying systems, and those depended on things still older … it became impossible to know all the systems could do. Deep in the interior of fleet automation there could be — there must be — a maze of trapdoors. Most of the authors were thousands of years dead, their hidden accesses probably lost forever. Other traps had been set by companies or governments that hoped to survive the passage of time."