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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

It's worse than that.

The CHAOS study, among others, shows that 80%+ of all software projects are viewed as failures by the people who pay for them.

Meanwhile you come onto boards like HN or reddit and instead of talking about how to establish and keep trust with the folks writing the checks, everybody's talking frameworks and tools.

So picture a subdivision where 80% of the houses are broken down, priced too high, incomplete, or put together haphazardly. Now stop at one of the houses where the building crew is still there and watch them spend all day talking about the nail-o-matic 200psi nailgun or the robot auto-roofer that the carpenters in the next town are using.

The situation is sad from every angle.

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A: "Dude, have you seen this Nail-o-Matic 2000 nailgun?"

B: "No. It looks totally awesome, it's so shiny and chrome..."

A: "Yeah, it's the latest thing, I picked it up last night. Let's see how it does on this roof..."

A puts a shingle down and shoots a nail in. The nail rips through the shingle, blasts a 2-inch diameter hole in the roof and embeds itself firmly into the floor of the second story.

B: "Whoa, that's AWESOME! Can I try?"

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

A: "Dude, this ROCKS! Hey, boss!"

C: "Yeah?"

A: "Good news, we're going to finish this job in record time!"

C: "Whoa! Where'd you score a Nail-o-Matic 2000!?! That's awesome! I've heard all sorts of great things about how powerful it is!"

Nail-o-Matic 2000: Because More Power Is Always Better. Always.

A. You know? What we really should do is get that new Blast-O-Matic bulldozer I have parked outside and tear all this crap down and start over! I saw a video on YouTube last night that said if we built houses using silly putty that they were impermeable to weather!

B. That's a great idea. Does it work with the Nail-o-Matic?

A. I don't see why not. They are both made of atoms.

C. Hang on guys. That's not going to work. What am I thinking?

A. What do you mean?

C. Dude. We have to draw pictures of the house first! I mean without pictures? We're just throwing stuff together. Our problem all along is that we haven't drawn enough pictures.

B. So if we draw enough pictures, then can we use the Blast-O-Matic, the Nail-O-Matic, and the silly putty?

C. Sure! I don't see why not. If we spend enough time drawing diagrams, dang near anything should be possible. At least on the diagram. Let me just pull out this circuit diagram for the Pentium CPU and we'll see how it relates to the average density of silly putty over time...

(B runs out and begins bulldozing house while A and C huddle over a blueprint with their slide rules)

B. Hey guys! You're doing a great job! Let me know when you're ready. I'll just go ahead and get started with the bulldozing.

So do I understand correctly that in this metaphor the poor quality of software is mostly because the practitioners are morons? I need to revisit the creeping complexity in my own projects and try to understand where I used the wrong nailgun, because this seems like a super productive analogy.

The joke is that nowhere in this picture is the actual guy who is receiving value from the work, the guy who keeps saying in survey after survey that our work sucks -- the guy paying for the house. We distract ourselves by everything under the sun from the continuous conversation and relationship management with the value receiver necessary to make sure we're doing something that the guy writing the check likes.

Sometimes we're distracted in an angry way "Guys! We need to straighten up and do X!" Sometimes we distract ourselves just because of bright and shiny objects "Wow! Take a look at that!" Sometimes we quibble over seemingly insignificant items. Sometimes we take things that should be important and elevate them to the highest level possible.

But the overall pattern is clear. We want to do anything and everything -- except be joined at the hip into the value stream, which is exactly what our job is.

This was the hard lesson that startups taught me: lots of stuff can be neat, valuable, or worth consideration. But a true professional knows that whatever he is doing, he is doing for another human being - and so he seeks to befriend that person, have a trustworthy relationship, and look out after that person's best interests.

That's not nearly as much fun as flipping bits, and it deals with a lot of messy social and human things.

Yes, but unsurprisingly so.

It is much easier to think that the project was a failure because tool choice instead of the actual reasons projects fail; of people who are not good enough to complete the project (junior carpenters put in charge of a skyscraper), management who wants people to build some impossible project on a tiny deadline (carpenter contracted to build stairway to heaven by October), or one of the other reasons software projects fail.

All of those problems require people and process work, not just technology, but as one of the biggest problems of tech is that we often see it as a panacea, we just think the new framework will somehow gloss over these major deficiencies.

> So picture a subdivision where 80% of the houses are broken down, priced too high, incomplete, or put together haphazardly.

Well, in a typical subdivision, this is actually the case. Construction quality for housing in the US and Canada is woeful, though a lot of it isn't the carpenters' fault (but some of it is).

Also:

A) Phew, almost done with this roof.

MANAGER) Hey, Mr A! When you're done with the roof, can you build another one on top of it? So we can pick it off and use in our next project?

A) But... is it built using same blueprints as this one?

MANAGER) Of course not. Just make to roof so we can fit it on another building. That way we will save time.

A) But that does not make sense. I can build the other roof much faster than we will spend time transporting and adapting this one -

MANAGER) Of course we will save time. You used nail-o-matic 2000 didn't you?

A) Yes, but that doen't have anything to do with who long...

MANAGER) Good, good, now get going, build me another, reusable roof.

MANAGER: (Gets out brochure from a construction firm) See this Whiz-O-Matic armor-plated flying roof with squirrel attack system? Just make it like it looks in this picture. Come on, guys. You're professionals, right? This kind of thing must be trivial for you.

There's also the issue of people being familiar with houses and their limitations, and not asking for a 5 storey house in a 10m x 10m terrain, or that the house automatically lets them in without using keys, or that they want a mansion for 10x less the needed budget

I wrote about the different worlds of people that form the bulk of the CHAOS study and what seemingly is the crowd on HN and Reddit at https://blog.ukigumo.eu/3-types-of-company/

In short, most projects fail because many companies either don't understand IT well enough to take advantage of it or are too focused on IT to understand business.

It's easier to blame a heap of software than yourself.

I've worked with really horrible frameworks in the past and most devs were like "well I wrote a wrapper to get the ugly stuff out of the way and then build it the right way", most of the time they didn't even bother to learn how things work.

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