Comment by EnKopVand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EnKopVand | Hacker News Reader

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Building houses became a profession over thousands of years, however, only beginning to have real standards when the masons banded together in guilds. These guilds only attained the power they did because people die when buildings collapse, and important people care when churches collapse. By comparison our profession is, extremely, young and a lot of the software we build doesn’t really matter and doesn’t really have anyone that cares enough about it for there to be consequences.

This is why I both agree and disagree with the article. Because anyone can frankly build a house, and a lot of people around the world, not only do so themselves, they do so poorly. At the same time there are a lot of parts of software that are inaccessible to most software developers.

Banking and medical software developers tend to care quite a lot about your qualifications and even the modern coding interview is sort of there because our profession lack the “trade skill approval” seal that builders and electricians get.

On the flip side of this I live in the city of Aarhus. Some years ago we got a new form of public transportation called Letbanen, which is a street level metro (I’m not sure what they are called in English). It was sort of a standard product that my city bought and it runs in both Norway and Switzerland during their winters that are worse than hours. Last week it was cancelled 5 days out of 7 because the electricity lines were frozen. I love the thing and I don’t mean to complain about it or pretend to know why my city can’t make it work when a city in Norway can, but the fact is that it doesn’t work and tens of thousands of commuters haven’t been able to rely on it for a couple of winters now.

It’s CEO hasn’t changed.

This is a standard product that was build by certified people that keeps people from getting to their jobs without having a car (in Denmark it’s common not to need a car in our larger cities), and yet, there hasn’t been a lot of consequences for it failing the same way for several years.

A bit off-topic, but regarding the reliability of trams: In Switzerland, we have them in basically every city with a population larger than about 50‘000 (just a guesstimate). Maybe it helps that they have much more experience here. I can only remember a single day in the past 10 years when the trams were delayed in my city because everyone was surprised by the early snow and there were no plows ready. But it was the same for cars, busses and cabs.

Do they share lanes for different directions?

I’ve read that they run so well in Norway because the goo they put on the power lines doesn’t get scraped off because they have two sets of rails, one for each direction.

It doesn’t bother me personally, I live inside the city so I typically walk or bike to work, so I haven’t followed the evolving scandal too much.

> Banking and medical software developers tend to care quite a lot about your qualifications and even the modern coding interview is sort of there because our profession lack the “trade skill approval” seal that builders and electricians get.

As someone that's worked around banking and finance a fair amount in the last few years, I'd say this is not universally true. I've never worked in the medical sphere, but I have worked on everything from tiny payment systems at SMEs to massive compute systems at banks in the top handful of the fortune 500, to quasi-governmental inter-bank communications bodies, and really I've not seen any more focus on qualifications, nor reliance on 'hard' coding interviews than I've seen elsewhere in software.

Maybe medical is different, AFAICT finance and banking ain't.

In medical, you primarily need to be able to handle the bureaucratic processes imposed by the various standards. It may be these processes help with writing good software, but it's perfectly possible to have "compliant" software which is terrible. The problem is attempts to legislate for quality end up legislating for proxies for quality.

I've seen some of that in banking, where retail banks will have things like 15 levels of sign off (ok I jest but it feels like it) before any new release, because the financial bodies that govern them require there to be a set of compelling reasons and a huge doc-trail before anything happens.

But some banks (Starling in the UK) seemed to be able to work around that and have a decent CI/CD story, and as you say - it doesn't usually make the software any better, just adds bureaucracy.

I work as a senior developer for one of the largest banks in the US at the moment, and have also worked for a subsidiary of the largest medical provider in the city. Neither of these companies had particularly challenging interviews. Generally, if you are IT, the interviews are simple.

The only people who I have met who turn the interview process into a gamut of algorithm puzzles, are people who happen to be very good at them. These also don't tend to be the people running things at banks, let alone large ones.

Maybe because these companies see the coding part as almost mechanical and try to tackle the complexity with (often overboarding) design and processes? Problem is that those assume that a tree like divide-and-conquer will reduce complexity in the "leaf-nodes", but as soon as you have a lot of cross-cutting dependencies everybody is shaking that tree.

The problem with "artisanal developers" is that they tend to overestimate their proximity and underestimate how much of a "system" they actually should build. Most of the time they lack domain knowledge, too.

If you can identify the cross-cutting interactions that will result in the biggest risk for the project, and put how to handle those in a design that is communicated well, you can leave freedom how to do the rest and the craftsmen will be appeased. But that needs a good deal of domain (and people) knowlege.

I think you’re right. My experiences in the Danish enterprise sector has been that banking and medical are very serious. But that can’t be taken as a universal truth.

I also think it depends on how you define quality. In terms of medical my qualification criteria is based around a 0 deaths or 0 failure rate over a lifetime, not so much what it was build with. Some people would likely disagree with that.

Serious, with a focus on quality, yes I guess that is there in finance. People's money is at stake so we need to have well designed standards, protocols etc.

But for who gets in the door for implementation work, it's still tech conversations and a bit of "who you know" that count over qualifications and hard tests, in my experience.

In my city the medical companies are always hiring devs. The same ones over and over. They have to be throwing bodies at the situation.

I'm really intrigued to know what the issue is with the tram... I live in Vilnius where the coldest it's been since I've moved here is -20c and our trolley bus network has no issues operating in that. I was thinking maybe it's because you are on the coast, so the salty air causes issues, but so are the most populated cities in Norway. Maybe it's like the UK where they figured they could save money by having less extreme hardy equipment, and so whenever it drops below freezing the entire country grinds to a halt.

> street level metro (I’m not sure what they are called in English)

A tram

Also a trolley or a street car - and if pulled along via ropes, a cable car when flat or a funicular when ascending.

AFAIK Aarhus Letbane is light rail with a tram-like setup in the city center, but outside the center more traditional light rail: faster than tram and has right-of-way / separate from other traffic.

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