Software development is a loser’s game

That article taught me more more about tennis than about software development.

It looks like the kind of obvious linkedin article young people write after reading Clean Code :D

I'd be more interested in project size, business pressure, cost incentives etc to explain why software always grow to a direction that seems to hinge on the unmanageable.

For instance I agree and implement all he says, but let's take one example: we can love unit tests, and I never push something for review without many, but there are fundamental limits to them: you can assert wrong in many ways without any kind of measure beyond coverage, you can make the same mistakes in the tests as you did in the implementation because you just misunderstood the business, you can rush a solution to solve a problem happening yesterday, and test half of the problem etc.

So doing unit tests ONLY won't save you either.

My 2 cent would be to make us users of the software, that would really help move towards stuff we stuffer tenfold the limitations and failures of. Adding unit test in the process is the absolute minimum (so I agree amateurs only should dislike them), but still just the minimum to get anything serious out. The maximum is to make us the clients, or them the programmers. A direction we discuss in investment banking where we fire traders to replace them with people who can launch profilers during automated trading.

Further, management notices and rewards the developer who is chewing through tickets, especially when those tickets are visible, user-facing features. If those developers are sloppy (and they tend to be), the bugs, readability issues, etc don’t get traced back to them and the rest of the team gets no glory for cleaning up after them and actually productionizing the prototype-grade shit they deploy to production.

This removes so much headache in the long run. Often by writing tests you discover something not considered before and that improves the product a lot and its stability. I have some projects that have been online for like 4 years now without reboot. They have very good coverage. I hate going through logs and debugging, and I almost never do it after committing to testing. Things just work.

An ask of anyone reading this article: Please don’t let yourself become a smug or cynical programmer.

Too many programmers read articles like this and assume that they are the 20% of good programmers while everyone who disagrees with them is the 80% of amateur developers:

> I have worked in software development for 20 years, worked on many projects with many software developers. I estimate 80 percent of software developers are amateurs and 20 percent professionals

Yes, it’s true that some programmers deliver better results than others. It’s also true that some have better methods than others. However, this is one of those situations where if you pulled developers aside and asked them to rank themselves relative to their peers, you might get 80% of people rating themselves as above average and 50% of people claiming to be in the top 20%.

A common pitfall I see is when developers forget that the goal is to ship software and instead focus on doing everything the most correct and perfect way they can think of, regardless of their resources. I’ve worked with many teams of professional programmers who spent so much time perfecting their tooling and code and architecture that they rarely ever shipped anything. Learning the tools of the trade is important, but don’t lose sight of the goal: We need to strike a balance and get work done, not just perfect our craft in a vacuum.