The Cost of Net Negative Producing Programmers

Re:The Cost of Net Negative Producing Programmers by pchristensen on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @09:23AM (#421935)

This and the NASA piece both talk about how all software should always be better, and the comments all have a resounding "here, here!" agreeing quality to them. But no one mentions that there is a cost to higher quality software. The system is the way is because people have made it work this way.

Software will continue to be bad as long as clients accept bad software. Companies will continue to buy bad software as long as they don't know where to find demonstrably better software.

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Re:The Cost of Net Negative Producing Programmers by yummyfajitas on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @11:59AM (#422104)

Bad software is often better than none at all. Unfortunately, there are not enough good programmers available to provide good software to all.

What's worse, a database that screws up 1% of the time, or an army of paper pushers that costs thousands of times more and also has a 1% error rate which can't be fixed (if necessary) by some overpaid consultant?

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Re:The Cost of Net Negative Producing Programmers by loluyede on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @09:28AM (#421942)

Don't think it's gonna change anytime soon. Contrary of other professions we don't really have a blueprint to create good software and estimate it. We can't even decide which is the better paradigm or software methodology to create something...

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Re:The Cost of Net Negative Producing Programmers by jodrellblank on Tuesday January 06, 2009 @06:49PM (#422701)

Software will continue to be bad

Not bad. As Randy Pausch said in the lecture that was on the front page yesterday, "There's a reason we have the phrase 'good enough' - for things that are good enough".

Companies will continue to buy bad software as long as it's good enough. (That is - maybe they aren't even looking for demonstrably better software).

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