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Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)

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Re: Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)

#21

Post by mstipetic »

ardit33 wrote: post #18
mstipetic wrote: post #16

It's because most software developers add negative value. Most not them aren't investing in learning at all and are just playing around and understanding things on the surface level. I'm fairly certain it takes much more learning and effort to keep up to date as an accountant than a software engineer. I've been getting into elixir and was very sad to realise that a lot of the best practices have been enshrined into t…

"it takes much more learning and effort to keep up to date as an accountant than a software engineer" you are wrong in many levels.... accounting is a field that moves slowly and it is highly regulated Software is still in the wild wild west phase, and it catches and loses trends all the time. We are currently using languages and platforms that didn't exist at all 10-12 years ago, yet, in 10 years whatever you are do…

Why is that? It's because we don't learn from the past and keep thinking we're the smartest and have to reinvent everything with every new generation of developers.

I've worked at a company where elasticseatch, postgres, message queues, custom microservice platforms, custom cicd platforms were deployed for a load that could fit in ram of one machine. With maybe 10 customers per minute.

And you're wrong about accounting, new laws and regulations are being passed constantly and one has to keep up with them all the time

Re: Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)

#22

Post by nsm »

I really like Dorian Taylor's analogy of software to movie production: https://doriantaylor.com/softwares-ailing-mythology Their point is that software is a refinement of a process to the point where it can be executed by a computer (in a generally bug-free manner). Just like a movie spends a lot of time in pre-production and writing the script, we must spend a lot of time on refining our own understanding of our processes, before trying to explain them to computer via code. The faster one jumps to code, the more likely one is to have to go back and fix things, delaying the delivery of software.

So software is more similar to writing novels or movies, than construction, where a lot of time is spent just thinking through things, and going through the ups and downs of "writer's block". Perhaps one way out is to loosen the delineation between making software and using software (a la spreadsheets, Smalltalk) and moving towards more programmable environments, so one doesn't deliver software, but rather allow users to build their own as part of refining their processes.

Re: Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)

#23

Post by gonzo41 »

mstipetic wrote: post #16

It's because most software developers add negative value. Most not them aren't investing in learning at all and are just playing around and understanding things on the surface level. I'm fairly certain it takes much more learning and effort to keep up to date as an accountant than a software engineer. I've been getting into elixir and was very sad to realise that a lot of the best practices have been enshrined into t…

You may be jaded, but it doesn't mean you're wrong. Framework churn is such an issue, and so it language and all the other fashions that we are victim too. People don't spend enough time getting value from what they decide to use.

I think a more relaxing way to think about software, is to think about bridges and buildings. Sometimes bridges and buildings fall down. It happens less now. However, Civil engineers have had about ~2500 years to try all the combos and now they can both make things both robust and pretty.

If software is bridges, we as an industry spend a lot of effort on the gold plating very rickety construction. Gold plating in the form of over security engineering inconsequential little things, over complicating UI's, rapidly building new languages because of a perceptual deficiency in language Y.

It'll stabilize, and success will go up. The business / PM side is also new at this and doesn't control risk well yet. Agile and Scrum attempt it but .... the same fundamentals that get a building built well and on budget also apply to good software.

Re: Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)

#24

Post by cosmotic »

01000010x wrote: post #5

Also, user needs are evolving constantly (or are identified in an iterative cycle) and code is structurally not very good at changing constantly.

More so than user needs are user expectations, which are often just following trends set by larger software companies with much larger budgets. And just like other trends, they rapidly change and are fleeting.

Re: Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)

#27

Post by RandallBrown »

js8 wrote: post #8
SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #2

Some interesting thoughts in here. I guess the main thing is that there is basically infinite demand for more things in software. You can take almost any feature from any product and come up with new things you would like it to do that would take entire teams of developers to work on. Software will never get quicker to develop because we will always request the absolute maximum amount of features that the market can…

But do we actually have more features? I don't think Google Docs has more features than Ami Pro. I think the problem is the modern focus on adding features, without consideration whether and how these compose. Not all features are equal - some can be used as a foundation on which more can be easily built, while some are a detriment to that. Just adding features without architectural consideration leads to - surprisin…

Did Ami Pro let dozens of users around the world edit the same document at the same time? Some of them being on cell phones?

Did it automatically store your document somewhere that can be accessed from any computer with internet access?

Seems to me like we really do have more features.

Re: Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)

#28

Post by lisper »

boris wrote: post #20

One aspect that is not mentioned is that we build software on top of an ever-increasing number of first-to-market, low-quality, building blocks. And by low-quality I mean "worse is better"/MVP/"everyone makes mistakes"/"leaky abstractions"/etc -- pick your favorite. As a result, we spend more and more time dealing with someone else's mistakes rather than making forward progress.

I dunno, there's a lot of really high quality stable software out there. It's not all crap.

But as someone who has had the luxury of taking time to do things the Right Way let me tell you from firsthand experience: doing things the Right Way is incredibly hard in no small measure because figuring out what you actually want to do is incredibly hard. There have been many times when I thought I was building something for the ages only to discover that I had made a bad assumption, or technology changed, or the market changed, or my own desires changed. The process of meeting human needs is messy because both human needs and the tools we have at our disposal are a constantly moving target.

Re: Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)

#29

Post by pm90 »

mstipetic wrote: post #21
ardit33 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it takes much more learning and effort to keep up to date as an accountant than a software engineer" you are wrong in many levels.... accounting is a field that moves slowly and it is highly regulated Software is still in the wild wild west phase, and it catches and loses trends all the time. We are currently using languages and platforms that didn't exist at all 10-12 years ago, yet, in 10 years whatever you are do…

Why is that? It's because we don't learn from the past and keep thinking we're the smartest and have to reinvent everything with every new generation of developers. I've worked at a company where elasticseatch, postgres, message queues, custom microservice platforms, custom cicd platforms were deployed for a load that could fit in ram of one machine. With maybe 10 customers per minute. And you're wrong about accounti…

Its important to distinguish b/w anecdotal experience and industry trends. A lot of great tech was invented to solve very real problems that groups of people faced. Once it gets hyped though, everyone wants it in their stack because they've read about it in blog posts or want to give a conference talk about or .

Elasticsearch, postgres, message queues etc. all were invented by people when they faced real problems. As such, I don't view them as reinventions, but as simply inventions. Software engineers tackle a problem space thats truly ginormous and diverse. It seems quite natural that this situation would spawn a multitude of tools to manage that complexity, get a competitive edge, or just build a product that just wasn't possible before.

Re: Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)

#30

Post by dxdm »

boris wrote: post #20

One aspect that is not mentioned is that we build software on top of an ever-increasing number of first-to-market, low-quality, building blocks. And by low-quality I mean "worse is better"/MVP/"everyone makes mistakes"/"leaky abstractions"/etc -- pick your favorite. As a result, we spend more and more time dealing with someone else's mistakes rather than making forward progress.

This has not been my experience in backend development (and some dabbling in building small React frontends). Our building blocks are FOSS components who are quite robust and widely tested, and the bugs, mistakes and shortcuts we have to deal with are almost exclusively of our own making.
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