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How Scared Should We Be That So Much of It Is So Bad?

By tovarichpeter   Follow   Wed, 8 Aug 2012, 10:54am   375 views   5 comments
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http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/software-runs-the-world-how-scared-should-we-be-that-so-much-is-bad/260846/

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1. Dan8267 Follow Befriend (16) 769 threads 7,714 comments Boca Raton, FL Premium

   1   11:47am Wed 8 Aug 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   Well, according to every manager, "Any monkey can code.". Therefore, we shouldn't be at all concerned about the quality of software. If there were any variation in the quality, correctness, and reliability of software, that would mean that software developers do matter and that writing software correctly is a skill that not everyone possesses. In fact, that whole line of thinking would bring you to the conclusions that 1. 99% of the population couldn't write a functioning software system in any complex domain. 2. Of the 1% that could, 99% would produce a barely functioning system loaded with mistakes and inefficiencies, not to mention, poor architecture, design, and implementation. 3. Only about 1 in 10,000 people or 700,000 people in the world could develop software at a level of competency that commercial systems demand. …levels necessary to run international commerce and banking require. 4. And only about 1% of those are truly talented developers capable of great innovation and advancement of the software industry and all other fields as all other fields are effected by software. * Numbers based upon my professional observations of the software field and discussions I’ve had with colleagues involving real-world examples. Of course, if you believed that, then you would have to conclude that software developers warrant higher income levels than shoe shine boys, a profession that cannot be outsourced. But hey, any monkey can code. And when monkeys code, In March, BATS, an electronic exchange, pulled its IPO because of problems with its own trading systems. During the Facebook IPO in May, NASDAQ was unable to confirm orders for hours. The giant Swiss bank UBS lost more than $350 million that day when its systems kept re-sending buy orders, eventually adding up to 40 million shares that it would later sell at a loss. Then last week Knight Capital -- which handled 11 percent of all U. S. stock trading this year -- lost $440 million when its systems accidentally bought too much stock that it had to unload at a loss. I wonder how many of those managers who think software development is essentially unskilled labor could fix the bugs in their company’s systems if their lives literally depended on it. I think we’d have a lot of dead managers.

2. Dan8267 Follow Befriend (16) 769 threads 7,714 comments Boca Raton, FL Premium

   2   12:03pm Wed 8 Aug 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like (2)   Dislike   There are solutions to these problems, but they are neither easy nor cheap. You need to start with very good, very motivated developers. You need to have development processes that are oriented toward quality, not some arbitrary measure of output. You need to have a culture where people can review each other's work often and honestly. You need to have comprehensive testing processes -- with a large dose of automation -- to make sure that the thousands of pieces of code that make up a complex application are all working properly, all the time, on all the hardware you need to support. You need to have management that understands that it's better to ship a good product late than to ship a bad product on time. Few software companies do this well, and even fewer of the large companies that write much of their software. All true, but misses the most important point. Software development by its very nature is doing something innovative, something that has never been done before. If a problem has already been solved, it’s always cheaper to buy the solution than to solve it yourself. The harder the problem, the more so. As such, it only makes sense to write software to problems that haven’t been solved, particularly hard problems because industry pays for value added and solving a hard problem adds far more value than solving an easy one. This means that the software developer is the ultimate problem solver. He has to have as much knowledge and understanding in the domain (finance, medicine, retail, animation, publishing, etc.) as any domain expert. Yet he also has to be extremely intelligent and innovative, and he has to possess a huge base of technical skills (platforms, languages, APIs, frameworks, design patterns, architectural knowledge, and abstract concepts). Ultimately this means that software development cannot be dumbed down. Software developers must acquire as much knowledge in the field of software development itself alone as doctors acquire in the field of medical care. Additionally, with every job the software developer must also acquire vast knowledge of the business domain. Furthermore, the software developer must design new models of operation that the domain experts could never even imagine. For example, no book publishing domain expert would have come up with the idea of Amazon.com. Nor did any of the newspapers come up with the idea of news distribution over the Internet and empowering the reader to pull news articles from any source in the world based on subject matter he finds interesting. No domain expert could innovate the way that software developers do on a daily basis. It’s hard to think outside the box when you are the box. Domain experts are by definition boxes of knowledge and experience. Given the importance of software development in the modern world, the immense difficulty of writing correct software, the rareness of the talent of writing software correctly (elegant architecture, design, and implementation), and the extraordinary intellectual burdens placed on software developers by the business domain, it is utterly ridiculous to treat software development as anything but the most highly skilled profession in the world. Any monkey can be a CEO. No CEO could be a software developer.

3. Peter P Follow Befriend (4) 117 threads 17,655 comments Premium

   3   12:11pm Wed 8 Aug 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   A lot of CEOs are good software developers though.

4. Dan8267 Follow Befriend (16) 769 threads 7,714 comments Boca Raton, FL Premium

   4   1:16pm Wed 8 Aug 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   Peter P says A lot of CEOs are good software developers though. Maybe in small startup companies founded by software developers. In rare cases like Google, a company founded by a few developers can become big. But the typical fortune 500 company is ran by an idiot not worthy of writing a unit test for a real developer's code.

5. thunderlips11 Follow Befriend (13) 52 threads 2,639 comments Premium

   5   7:52am Thu 9 Aug 2012   Share   Quote   Permalink   Like   Dislike   A CEO is a man sitting inside an office (corner office), located in a box (Floor of the Building), that's also inside a box (office building), that he was driven to in a box (Limo) thinking that he thinks outside the box.