I have a theory that software drives people insane

As a freelancer my process involves a lot of observation, asking questions and planning. Usually when I go into the details more questions emerge and whom to ask better than the people who do exactly this daily? Sure sometimes their process is a bad abstraction, they chose because they did not knew better and thus not worth putting into software. But before you decide that you gotta ask whether there are reasons why it was done that way. I see my task as a programmer to make peoples lives easier, by finding elegant abstractions for their problems, that are at the same time, reliable, adjustable, encourage correctness, avoid problems and so on.

Now most software companies I interacted with from the other side did none of the things. They rushed to gather the specs, asked some questions in the beginning and were out of the door to start way too fast, with some things they just assumed without confirming. Then crickets and then something half broken comes around that you need to beat into shape in an exhausting back and forth, where again you have to be the person with the questions.

If it is exhausting for a person with software development experience to be your customer, how bad will it be for people who have no such experience.

Now there are of course exceptions also in such companies, but in my experience that is mich rarer than it should be.

> Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features.

At my friend's org, they like it to suck bc that reminds them they are doing the very sophisticated work of dogfooding. No one told them they're allowed/supposed to feel good making/using the sw...

"We want to feel the same pain the customer feels" is shortened to "we want to feel pain." Instead of "neither we nor the customer feel pain."

Why, of course! We leave the kitchen deployment where it is, and just install a proxy kitchen facade on the other side of the house, which does everything via the original kitchen through remote procedure calls.

Read back through and apply every example given through that lens.

It is possible that we're in an industry that inordinately expresses this part of human nature, but I'm pretty sure it shows up everywhere though different anecdota. Apply a reductionist Zen Buddhist view to your professional creativity and all of this goes away.

Bob wants to refactor a subsystem because it will make him a hero, and if he positions it correctly to management, the technical merit and actual realized level of success will be irrelevant. Alice chooses to surface some obvious concerns and then sit back and watch the show. Jane chooses to throw her hands up in stand-up and try to emotionally convince everyone the sky will fall. Be like Alice and preserve your sanity.