Re:Correctness – A paradigm for sustainable software develop...
by tluyben2 on Saturday April 06, 2019 @08:32AM
(#19590418)
> Namely, is crappy software actually more efficient?
I have many many examples from real life, for instance, one from banking; sometimes I have to work with systems that are responsible for 100s of millions of $ in transactions that are just ductaped heaps of crap. They are running on many servers because they continuesly crash and mess things up (literally corrupt data which has to be manually fixed).
The software was written by juniors with a lead tech who only made some web scripts before and all was hurried to the 'finish line' to get more investment.
All of these decision where economic; hire cheap people to show bums on seats, hire cheap management because good management costs a lot keep pushing for deployments even though everything is ill tested because the need for more money.
The result is that the entire team is all day (and night) busy putting out random appearing fires and the average period for an employee to stay is 6 months after which the stress catches up.
Ofcourse they still are doing really well as these type of companies are experts at hiding things like this. Thick rows of sales and account management people to hide the poor execution. Reminds me of IBM in the 80-90s; slick looking suits and shiny boxes but the software they shipped was just pure vomit; it still sold fine (not sure if it changed; I have not worked with them anymore).
Obviously they would be really raking it in if there weren't 40 people 24/7 trying to keep the stuff on the servers from completely exploding.
After a week of hard work in these kind of circumstances, I always enjoy reading HN + Reddit in the weekend and seeing these wide eyed youngsters here thinking that every company does code reviews, unit tests, uses versioning tools (...), not using php for near real time banking backend banking transaction applications (...), kubernetes/docker, microservices, serverless software while in reality it is a microscopic % and very large numbers of money is still being earned through absolute software poop.
I have many many examples from real life, for instance, one from banking; sometimes I have to work with systems that are responsible for 100s of millions of $ in transactions that are just ductaped heaps of crap. They are running on many servers because they continuesly crash and mess things up (literally corrupt data which has to be manually fixed).
The software was written by juniors with a lead tech who only made some web scripts before and all was hurried to the 'finish line' to get more investment.
All of these decision where economic; hire cheap people to show bums on seats, hire cheap management because good management costs a lot keep pushing for deployments even though everything is ill tested because the need for more money.
The result is that the entire team is all day (and night) busy putting out random appearing fires and the average period for an employee to stay is 6 months after which the stress catches up.
Ofcourse they still are doing really well as these type of companies are experts at hiding things like this. Thick rows of sales and account management people to hide the poor execution. Reminds me of IBM in the 80-90s; slick looking suits and shiny boxes but the software they shipped was just pure vomit; it still sold fine (not sure if it changed; I have not worked with them anymore).
Obviously they would be really raking it in if there weren't 40 people 24/7 trying to keep the stuff on the servers from completely exploding.
After a week of hard work in these kind of circumstances, I always enjoy reading HN + Reddit in the weekend and seeing these wide eyed youngsters here thinking that every company does code reviews, unit tests, uses versioning tools (...), not using php for near real time banking backend banking transaction applications (...), kubernetes/docker, microservices, serverless software while in reality it is a microscopic % and very large numbers of money is still being earned through absolute software poop.