> I honestly don’t blame them: [...] software is software
That attitude is the problem. Why does our industry have that attitude towards quality? Every bike shop in my little town is better with quality than the average software shop in the world. Yes, software is more complex than bicycle. But a software engineer also gets paid 10x and has the luxury of spending substantial time on their product, compared to the 10 minutes it takes the bike guy down the street to diagnose and then fix an issue with my bike which I then trust my life with once they are done and I bike through traffic.
We need to treat software differently. "Oh well, it's just software shrug" does not cut it anymore, if it even ever did.
You just explained why it is not taken seriously, though - your life does not depend on it. Most software is not critical to life. Once you cut out the software that exists purely to streamline capitalism, then cut out entertainment... you've eliminated most software from the picture. The stuff that remains, that drives our infrastructure, cars, anything where a failure could harm someone... that is the stuff where quality matters.
When I worked in IT at a hospital, we even had that as an explicit line drawn between 2 departments - IT supported everything that had zero impact on patient health, there was an entirely different department for anything that could impact a patient. And yes, their work was often simple mechanical fixes to health care equipment, while our projects were multi-year reinventions of patient record systems and upgrades to the physical infrastructure of the network, etc. But we never got confused as to which department was actually more important to the patients.
I'm not saying the attitude is OK. It would be lovely if everyone cared about quality. I'm just saying there is a somewhat legit reason for it.
teiferer · · focus · HN ↗
That attitude is the problem. Why does our industry have that attitude towards quality? Every bike shop in my little town is better with quality than the average software shop in the world. Yes, software is more complex than bicycle. But a software engineer also gets paid 10x and has the luxury of spending substantial time on their product, compared to the 10 minutes it takes the bike guy down the street to diagnose and then fix an issue with my bike which I then trust my life with once they are done and I bike through traffic.
We need to treat software differently. "Oh well, it's just software shrug" does not cut it anymore, if it even ever did.
codingdave · · focus · HN ↗
When I worked in IT at a hospital, we even had that as an explicit line drawn between 2 departments - IT supported everything that had zero impact on patient health, there was an entirely different department for anything that could impact a patient. And yes, their work was often simple mechanical fixes to health care equipment, while our projects were multi-year reinventions of patient record systems and upgrades to the physical infrastructure of the network, etc. But we never got confused as to which department was actually more important to the patients.
I'm not saying the attitude is OK. It would be lovely if everyone cared about quality. I'm just saying there is a somewhat legit reason for it.