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The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

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Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#151

Post by orochimaaru »

anal_reactor wrote: post #71
quietbritishjim wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but if everyone is low quality then there's no one to do that correction. That may seem a bit hypothetical but it can easily happen if you have a company that systematically underpays, which I'm sure many of us don't need to think hard to imagine, in which case they will systematically hire poor developers (because those are the only ones that ever applied).

Sad truth is that average dev is average, but it's not polite to say this out loud. This is particularly important at scale - when you are big tech at some point you hit a wall and no matter how much you pay you can't attract any more good devs, simply because all good devs are already hired. This means that corporate processes must be tailored for average dev, and exceptional devs can only exist in start-ups (or her…

Learning new technologies wasn’t the issue with the Therac. In fact as someone who has been coding and leading sw engineering teams for the past 28 yrs, I don’t like “new technologies”. When someone does this awesome complicated async state machine using a large set of brittle components alarm bells go off and I make it my life’s mission to make it as simple as it needs to be.

A lot of times that is boring meetings to discuss the simplification.

I can extend the same analogy to all the gen ai bs that’s floating around right now as well.

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#152

Post by Liquix »

skinwill wrote: post #64
jacquesm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now we have Chipsoft, arguably one of the worst players in the entire IT space that has a near monopoly (around me, anyway) on IT for hospitals. They charge a fortune, produce crap software and the larger they get the less choice there is for the remainder. It is baffling to me that we should be enabling such hostile players.

Around here we have Epic. If you want a good scare, look up their corporate Willy Wonka-esq jail/campus and their policy of zero remote work.

I thought "Willy Wonka-esque" was tongue in cheek, but they have a yellow brick road leading up to the front door... absolutely bizarre

Those who want to escape the office altogether, can hop on one of the company’s 600 cow-print bikes to take meetings from a treehouse, slide down a rabbit hole or grab lunch in a train car.

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/01/inside-epic-systems-mythical...

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#153

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

scottLobster wrote: post #148
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #135

I worked for hardware manufacturers for most of my career, as a software guy. In my experience, hardware people really dis software. It's hard to get them to take it seriously. When something like this happens, they tend to double down on shading software. I have found it very, very difficult to get hardware people to understand that software has a different ruleset and workflow, from hardware. They interpret this as…

I think that was the F-35 incident (in Alaska).

The Therac-25 incident was a radiation overdose in Texas.

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#154

Post by scott_w »

varjag wrote: post #126
scott_w wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You conflated, misrepresented and simply ignored so many things in your statement that I really don’t know where to start rebutting it. I’d say at least compare SpaceX to NASA with space exploration but, even then, I doubt you have anywhere near enough knowledge of both programmes to be able to properly analyse, compare and contrast to back up your claim. Hell, do you even know if SpaceX or Tesla are even using an ag…

Hell, do you even know if SpaceX or Tesla are even using an agile methodology for their system development? What I've been saying is methodology is mostly irrelevant, not that waterfall is specifically better than agile. Talent wins over the process but I can see how this idea is controversial. I’d need to see some real examples of high talent, no process, teams compared to low talent, high process, teams, then some…

Except your only example was nonsensical on the face of it.

> Yep, even if I made it my life's mission to run a formal study on programmer productivity (which I clearly won't) that wouldn't save the argument from nitpicking.

I didn't ask for this, I just asked for sensible examples, either from your experience or from publicly available information.

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#155

Post by bobmcnamara »

pjmlp wrote: post #132
ozim wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey don’t blame developers. It is business who requests features ASAP to cut costs and and then there are customers who don’t want to pay for „ideal software” but rather have every software for free. Most devs and QA workers I know want to deliver best quality software and usually are gold plating stuff anyway.

Being a real Software Engineer, those that actually have the proper title, eventually with the final examination, means being able to deliver the best product within the set of given constraints. Also, speaking out when the train is visibly going against a wall.

In my country those are a myth. We had it as a professional engineering classification for a while but I'm not sure if anyone ever completed it. They cancelled it several years ago.

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#158

Post by SCdF »

hahn-kev wrote: post #49
SCdF wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Horizon (UK Royal Mail accounting software) incident killed multiple postmasters through suicide, and bankrupted and destroyed the lives of dozens or hundreds more. The core takeaway developers should have from Therac-25 is not that this happens just on "really important" software, but that all software is important, and all software can kill, and you need to always care.

From what I've read about that incident I don't know what the devs could have done. The company sure was a problem but also the laws basically saying a computer can't be wrong. No dev can solve that problem.

The code being absolute dog shit was true regardless of that law's existence. There are plenty of things the developers could have done.

That law is irrelevant to this situation, except in that the lawyers for Fujitsu / Royal Mail used it to imply their code was infallable.

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#159

Post by pjmlp »

bobmcnamara wrote: post #155
pjmlp wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a real Software Engineer, those that actually have the proper title, eventually with the final examination, means being able to deliver the best product within the set of given constraints. Also, speaking out when the train is visibly going against a wall.

In my country those are a myth. We had it as a professional engineering classification for a while but I'm not sure if anyone ever completed it. They cancelled it several years ago.

And in US anyone can call themselves whatever they feel like.

If you want professional quality, we're the first line of actually making it happen, blaming others won't change anything.

Re: The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

#160

Post by SCdF »

maweki wrote: post #72
SCdF wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Horizon (UK Royal Mail accounting software) incident killed multiple postmasters through suicide, and bankrupted and destroyed the lives of dozens or hundreds more. The core takeaway developers should have from Therac-25 is not that this happens just on "really important" software, but that all software is important, and all software can kill, and you need to always care.

But there is still a difference here. Provenance and proper traceability would have allowed the subpostmasters to show their innocence and prove the system failable. In the Therac-25 case, the killing was quite immediate and it would have happened even if the correct radiation dose was recorded.

I don't understand the distinction here.

> Provenance and proper traceability would have allowed

But there wasn't those things, so they couldn't, so they were driven to suicide.

Bad software killed people. It being slow or fast doesn't seem to matter.

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