This is a great essay. Also, the problem is capitalism and the fact that the argumentation won’t stop should probably tell us something.
Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
81–90 of 400 posts
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Capitalism is a handful of people who own the means of production and the rest of us trying to get by. Well, good thing then that the "means of production" for software development consist of a 500€ laptop, which is well within reach of just about every programmer in the Western world.
>Well, good thing then that the "means of production" for software development consist of a 500€ laptop, which is well within reach of just about every programmer in the Western world. Sure, now tell me your opinion on this idea I have Today for music there are many parasites that suck the profits and creators barely get something. So my idea is to make a cooperatives (or non-parasitic company) to help the creators o…
When people say capitalism is bad, what they're saying is allowing people to choose is bad. Because no one is forcing these products on anyone and nearly everyone has at least heard of the issues and mostly don't care.
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#83There’s no rigorous academic evidence for this, but a lot of companies have been backporting typescript/mypy/sorbet onto existing dynamic codebases and the case studies have been overwhelmingly positive. Not to be a buzzkill, but migration reports from any tech A to tech B are always overwhelmingly positive when the industry has a newlywed period with tech B. Save for a clear, undeniable failure the stakeholders will…
Typing is almost a no-loss addition though. If your function takes an integer argument and someone might pass it a string, that is a bug. It is quite hard to argue that a typing mechanism won't improve code quality, and it is very lopsided in the amount of time it takes to type a function vs. debug something that would have been caught by a type system. There are edge cases that can be argued all day, but if some lar…
What you’re describing is optional typing. What is usually derided as cumbersome is mandatory and exhaustive typing.
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#84> ...statically-typed languages are better for large projects than dynamically-typed languages...
> Formal methods will never be mainstream...
Say what? these two statements are written just 2 lines apart?
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#85> The open source maintainer problem isn’t going to get much better in the near future. People are gonna keep blaming “Capitalism” for this. People are gonna keep blaming “Capitalism” for a lot of irrelevant things. People are gonna argue with me about blaming “Capitalism”. Goddamn I am so tired of “the problem is CAPITALISM” takes and they will never stop The entitlement and arrogance is pretty mind-blowing - those…
The problem is that there’s no agreed-upon point when we give FOSS maintainers the negotiating power to get the compensation they actually need —- whether that is patches or pesos.
I argue that a healthier approach would be to own the foss-components you use and to try to build an internal understanding of them - no need to audit every line of code but at least some high-level understanding what every component does would already be helpful - try asking for resources to do so, I guess most of the time you will be laughed at. Also giving your devs the knowledge and time to upstream fixes until the maintainer is happy would be great - so many interesting forks and pull requests in all kinds of projects that are just dumped out there but the work to integrate it into upstream is something nobody is doing. This requires resources and resources are money and there is no direct benefit for the corporation. So it's quite a big problem.
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software is not charity but it's a responsibility. As probably the most innocent example, when you ship an app that drains a user's battery you betray your users. But then how about an app that sneakily collects data knowing that users won't even understand what you are doing or why? You can be a responsible business which unfortunately won't necessarily be appreciated. Or you can be a typical business that exploits…
If you don't like our current system that lets users decide what they can put up with or not then are you proposing some sort of centralized authority to enforce this? Like the government? The same governments of the world that produce the crappiest, most insecure, user hating software with some of the most ridiculous rules and regulations or else 10 layers of subcontractors making the price per line of code outrageo…
You could start with e.g. requiring full legal disclosure of what my data is used for. Apple is trying to move in that direction, but we can't be at the mercy of a private corporation no matter how good the intentions are, when it comes to user data and privacy. But Apple's new requirements on the App Store are an example of what's possible to do.
Performance and quality are a bit different, they are much harder to regulate but still possible to an extent.
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#87My Own Addition: 14. Those who code for a living make good money. I have a lot of friends who went into various fields, and it seems relative to the number of buttons we press daily, anyone who works on software makes great money. We didn't spend a ton of $ to go to medical school and 3 years of residency. We didn't go to law school and take the bar. Most of us went to 4 years, or less, of school, and here we are mak…
You’re not wrong, but I’ll say the part about not going into it for the money is becoming less and less true all the time.
For developers who are ~35 and up, almost 100% true, once you get younger than that you’ll find that there are a large and growing minority of people who are very much in it for the money alone without any particular interest or affinity for computing. Their parents, advisors, etc saw how much money was being made and pushed them towards computing as something more like a high ROI trade.
You see the same done for specialized welding for smart, but not academically smart, kids. It’s hard work to get into, but if you get there it can pay very well, regardless of if you care much about the underlying metallurgic properties that you’re dealing with or not.
This is completely fine either way, but it’s important to realize that we’re not really the professional of child prodigies that it once was.
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#88Another uncomfortable truth: most software engineers beyond a few years' experience are highly resistant to suggestions for improvement in their craft. They're more likely to use their intellectual/verbal skills to push back than to move forward.
Different people have different things they care about at different times. If I’m currently trying to improve my ability to do effective stakeholder interaction, I’m going to be reasonably resistant to switching to spending a bunch of time learning terraform.
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#89I’d never heard of mobbing. That’s an awesome idea.
My team calls it Swarming. We Swarm up on a problem like a bunch of hornets, together we hammer that shit from many angles, heavyweight team and then boom, it's done. I think I got it from TPS
Re: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering
#90>The open source maintainer problem isn’t going to get much better in the near future. >People are gonna keep blaming “Capitalism” for this. Capitalism is great, there really is no need to defend it at every opportunity, especially if no one is attacking it.
As a marxist, I will certainly concede that hand-wavy diagnoses of "capitalism" with no other analysis or consideration being applied to everything from mental illness to the domination of Marvel films is grating and meaningless.