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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Just the use of the word "shipped" implies that software is an interchangeable commodity that rolls off a conveyor belt in a factory.

That's not the reality with any software that actually matters, no matter how hard M.B.A.s try to abstract the human factor out of it.

Good software isn't manufactured. It's created. It takes thinking, and planning, and crafting, and all those things that are the opposite of a plastic widget factory that "ships" products to its customers.

Don't let then dehumanize the profession any more than it already is.

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Most commercially written software is closer to manufacturing than art. That doesn't satisfy everyone, I know, and I'm not here to judge people who don't want to work on integration #5 for widget #3 in order to unblock a million dollar contract from Foobar Inc. But that's where a substantial majority of the market demand for software development lies. The MBAs are paid precisely for their ability to channel the creative process of software development into the manufacturing slots where it's needed.

(Even art, of course, is in practice pretty close to this. MBAs are paying you to sublimate your creative energies into a snappy video on how to sign up for Robinhood or whatever, and there are substantial business constraints on both its content and delivery date.)

It's closer to engineering than either art or working on an assembly line. Software tasks just aren't fungible in most companies, and neither are they open-ended interpretable works designed to please or strike fear into the human soul. The average codebase is pleasing to me in the way an engine block or an oil refinery is pleasing. Q_rsqrt is pleasing in the way a mathematical proof is pleasing.

I’ve worked in engineering businesses, and SaaS scale ups and the “engineering” that gets done by SWEs had little to nothing in common with any of the engineering disciplines I’ve worked in apart from the E in the title.

Little comprehension about cost engineering, maintenance, safety, durability and resilience. Half-baked bodies of knowledge. CV driven development. Fads and critical production systems held together with spit, tape and hope. It’s like Aristotle’s Cave in our field.

And yet building software is still closer to engineering than it is to charcoal figure drawing or to driving a forklift at a door factory.

When you ship it is arts and crafts which usually leans heavily to a small group of people Then if you want it to be commercial succesfully it needs some manufacturing practices because otherwise, you end up with legacy software.

I don't know why this post is getting down voted but the MBAization is truly it.

MBA practices cannot deal with uncontrollable production. But software engineering is utter chaos. So they try to come up with bullshit units that can be easily managed in their opinion. But it never works - aka, a nimble competitor always eats the giant in software.

The MBA style practice does work in factories and warehouses. But in software, a nimble startup with own the incumbent just be providing higher quality value.

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