Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

The U.S. often sends their best and brightest to tech, consulting, law, and medicine. Other societies send theirs to education. Both can occur under capitalism. I would argue it’s not “capitalism” but that the economy is most valued. Capitalism could just as well make social workers the highest paid individuals if there was a different value construct.

That's true, and I'm glad they do that, though I'm under no pretence that they do it out of altruism or anything like that. Again, it's not that everything is bad under capitalism, but that incentives are aligned badly, and tend towards rent-seeking, exploitation and so on. Good things do still happen when the incentives work out alright.

> The scenario here is not: "get a free house" or "banks make massive profits on houses". So it's a bit of a false dichotomy you've created.

I didn't set up that dichotomy, I just said that capitalism didn't invent the house. There are alternative models of housing, like housing cooperatives, and historically houses were not built by corporations to put on the market, but by the government, by local workers, by communities etc - there are many historic models of home construction.

> Norway or another country and while they do have democratic socialism as a government system, they still employ capitalism as their economic model.

This is true (except the part where they're democratic socialist - they're actually social democracies, which is to say capitalism plus strong welfare, but close enough) - but your claim that these countries are the "most capitalist" was incorrect. Typically speaking, more versus less capitalism is an axis of laissez-faire capitalism, which is to say "the most capitalist" would be a neoliberal free market, and "the least capitalist", while still being capitalist, would be a strong social democracy like the Scandinavian model, where capitalism is quite heavily constrained. You might have seen other resources that use these terms differently, but that's what I was thinking.

I think there's a few pretty serious issues with capitalism that, left unaddressed, will cause serious material and social harm. Also, I don't think that we can resolve the climate change crisis through pricing in emissions through something like cap and trade. I think we solve it practically through changing how we live, trying to reduce emissions systemically while aiming to maintain or even improve living standards. One example would be mixed land development coupled with better urban transit, to reduce car usage - but both the car lobby and the fossil fuel lobby will block this, due to the nature of regulatory capture (an inherent problem with capitalism). Even switching to EVs doesn't solve the issue of rare earth mining using exploitative labour (eg cobalt mining by child slaves) - because neocolonialism is another problem caused by capitalism.

The problem in my mind is that there are few good alternatives or steps forward - 20th century attempts at socialism were a catastrophe. My assumption is that we're just going to charge through climate change headfirst until the environment is ruined beyond repair.

You don't need to cover all bases, in 99% of software. (And in the 1% where you do, you should probably be using formal verification.)

Testing is an investment and should be analyzed in terms of ROI. There is a cost to writing tests in advance, a cost to fixing bugs after writing the code, and a cost to shipping software with bugs left unfixed on rare codepaths. Sometimes TDD yields high returns indeed (usually for "library code" that (a) does something very complicated on a complex data structure; (b) is easily isolated from the rest of the system without writing tons of mocking infrastructure; (c) has a stable API that is not frequently refactored.) Often it does not. I've found that a combination of static assertions, black-box systems testing, and incrementally adding regression tests during debugging allows me to develop good code more efficiently than TDD the vast majority of the time. Your mileage may vary, of course.

I can't find any agreement on who first said that, but it appears that several great generals have said something like that.

> A monarchy with an effective ruler selection process is probably best.

That's called an election.