Re:Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona priso...
by jfengel on Monday February 22, 2021 @02:33PM
(#26229344)
I would love for software engineering as a discipline to go that way, but it's going to be very hard. Software usually has more moving parts than hardware.
I don't mean to understate the difficulty of being a hardware engineer, of any sort. But the whole reason we do things in software at all is because software is more flexible, and adding a new thing comes with less overhead. Hardware, while challenging, tends to follow similar sets of solutions to similar problems. There are only so many things a bridge, or a building, or even a CPU will be tasked to do.
Not saying this is impossible for software, either. Software gets built for man-rated tasks -- and jobs like this should be considered man-rated, because lives depend on it. That means it's going to cost more and take longer, especially when it's software of a kind nobody has ever built before. Who has experience in "software that releases prisoners?"
The reason they don't do that is, therefore, money. I doubt the prison system is willing to pay 10x as much for the software. The software was probably built by the lowest bidder technically acceptable, where "technically acceptable" was incredibly flexible because nobody really knew what had to be done.
I don't mean to understate the difficulty of being a hardware engineer, of any sort. But the whole reason we do things in software at all is because software is more flexible, and adding a new thing comes with less overhead. Hardware, while challenging, tends to follow similar sets of solutions to similar problems. There are only so many things a bridge, or a building, or even a CPU will be tasked to do.
Not saying this is impossible for software, either. Software gets built for man-rated tasks -- and jobs like this should be considered man-rated, because lives depend on it. That means it's going to cost more and take longer, especially when it's software of a kind nobody has ever built before. Who has experience in "software that releases prisoners?"
The reason they don't do that is, therefore, money. I doubt the prison system is willing to pay 10x as much for the software. The software was probably built by the lowest bidder technically acceptable, where "technically acceptable" was incredibly flexible because nobody really knew what had to be done.