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Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

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Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#1
If you have unlimited time and/or resources, what single software engineering problem would you address? I'm not talking about "Peace on Earth"-type problems, but rather real world practical problems facing software engineering that could be actually solved if you could pay an rationally large team of serious hackers a rationally large amount of money for a rationally long period of time. Another way of asking this is: What's the most important piece of technical debt across software engineering, that could practically be solved if we put enough energy into it?

Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#5
The decline of usability, recognizability and coherence in desktop user interfaces. I honestly think we reached peak UX some time in the mid-90s. With the advent of touch devices, paradigms are mixing in a way that's directly hostile to productivity.

Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#7
Most major problems now are people problems, not engineering problems.

One example: lots of software devs have no training and/or interest in security, and employers have no way to vet that.

Another: there is no way for users to trust SaaS security. I have no idea whether (as a random example) Atlassian has a great security culture or a terrible one. We just trust people who seem trustworthy, usually due to their polished marketing.

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