old-engineer

Did they apologize and try to fix it? This is not about being perfect. The parent post is fundamentally about caring about your mistakes.

There always will be good and bad craftsmen. I once overheard my electrician demanding the guy installing the alarm system to lay his cables properly.

You are right. This is the flip side of not treating software as an engineering discipline. But both parties are at fault. The business treats us like non-engineers and we don’t behave like ones.

What I think should be common in these two cases is the attitude of a professional towards their work.

Building software should be an engineering discipline with all its perks and responsibilities just like building bridges. We rarely see it and it propagates to the craftsmen who seriously believe that good quality software is impossible to write under the slightest of constraints. Like business pressure.

We had this ability in the past when programming was way more difficult, tedious and error prone. Look what IBM did with their “Clean Room” approach. I’m sure we still have it at many places but we choose to spread the myth that it cannot be done. This call to stop apologizing is the next step towards not even trying.

Would you be ok with your dentist being OK with her slip-ups?

“I really should have checked the x-ray better before I extracted your front tooth. But you know, I’m not sorry. It was an external constraint — there was a queue of patients waiting”.

I can’t believe how low we let this profession sink. I hope in 15 years we will look at thies era like we look at the Wild West today. Exciting from a distance but nobody would really like to live like that.