David Parnas on Software Engineering

I wonder how accurate that statement actually is:

One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. Hiring more bad programmers will just increase our perceived need for them. If we had more good programmers, and could easily identify them, we would need fewer, not more.

Most interesting bit for me:

>What is the most often-overlooked risk in software engineering?

>Incompetent programmers. [...] If we had more good programmers, and could easily identify them, we would need fewer, not more.

Strange how in what I have seen so far, when things go really bad, it almost never is a technical problem, its almost always a people's problem.

But he is still right that it is an often-overlooked problem and that we don't even perceive it as a problem. In many organizations, people have just accepted the effort and resources needed for building and maintaining software even tough it could be much less.

RE the incompetent programmers: Think of programmers as servers - you can either scale up reliable, powerful components, or scale out weak, unreliable components and make up the difference with process.