Software Drives People Insane
A pet theory that software makes people lose their sense of proportion: speed, money, complexity, abstraction, and unlimited freedom combine to create bizarre side effects. Most software is a glorified spreadsheet, yet the process turns ordinary adults into b-tier Bond villains. The lack of natural friction between idea and implementation means every 'cool idea' becomes urgent, and companies treat themselves as permanently mutable software, never leaving anything alone.
Software combines speed, money, complexity, abstraction, and almost unlimited freedom to change your mind. On their own, those things are perfectly manageable, but put them together and you start to get some really bizarre side-effects.
- bob1029
Software development untethered from the practical realities of the customer / user is what drives people insane.
When developers are required to interact with the customer on a regular basis, the freewheeling effects described in this article are damped massively.
The potential for insanity goes off the charts when the development team is siloed away in solitary confinement and the only interactions with the client occur via some prison guard known as "project manager" sliding notes under the door.
Working with the customer sometimes sucks. Just like exercise and eating vegetables sometimes suck. It's a temporary unhappiness that keeps us grounded in reality.
- hliyan
I was about to post this thought on the latest "We're moving from tech/architecture X to Y" post on the HN front page today, but now I feel it belongs here.
I was recently chatting with a friend about how we used to do so much more with so few developers: 20 years ago, we developed mission critical, real time software (trading systems) in C++ with team of a couple of dozen developers. The core trading kernel team was four people. An in-house distributed process orchestration tool (both front end and back end written in C++) were two guys. I myself once managed to produce an entire post-trade risk management system for futures contracts in a couple of months, working alone. Today, I see teams of 60-80 working on web and mobile applications where the vast majority of operations are CRUD, with some transaction/queue complexity at the extremities.
I think the difference is tech churn. Back then, what few dependencies we had in terms of either runtime libraries or development time tools, were stable: the standard library, compiler, unix commands and bash scripts, and some internal libraries. Much of our time and focus went into figuring out the right algorithms and data structures, with coding coming in second. Very little time was spent on selecting, configuring, updating, rearchitecting or replacing tech stacks and tools.
- tcdent
OP has practically observed the effect of the Ego via software, but hasn't quite arrived at the ability to quantify it.
Read back through and apply every example given through that lens.
It is possible that we're in an industry that inordinately expresses this part of human nature, but I'm pretty sure it shows up everywhere though different anecdota. Apply a reductionist Zen Buddhist view to your professional creativity and all of this goes away.
Bob wants to refactor a subsystem because it will make him a hero, and if he positions it correctly to management, the technical merit and actual realized level of success will be irrelevant. Alice chooses to surface some obvious concerns and then sit back and watch the show. Jane chooses to throw her hands up in stand-up and try to emotionally convince everyone the sky will fall. Be like Alice and preserve your sanity.
- randusername
My observation is simply that tech leaders misinterpret rewards from the market in conquering some abstract representation of a facet of a domain with conquering the domain itself. Then they become egomaniacal.
Did you conquer commercial real-estate ushering in the future of work and society, or did you build a handy scheduling app?
Did you have a neat idea for an online community or did you revolutionize human connection?
- Terr_
Reminds me of this 2014 post "Programming Sucks" [0], which touches on some similar issues of getting disconnected from reality in a microcosm that always "ought" to be better than it is.
> All programming teams are constructed by and of crazy people [...]
> The destructive impact on the brain is demonstrated by the programming languages people write. [...]
> All programmers are forcing their brains to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.
- cestith
Is it software having this effect or management over software products? I don't see many academic or hobby software projects constantly changing what's important to them on a whim. It can be seen all the time in the software industry though.
- anigbrowl
It's not software; it's the fact that most managers/administrators are not software developers (although they may have some programming ability). so they stand in teh same relationto their development team as cusomers complaining to a manufacturer about the features on a physical product, and saying 'it should do this or that, it's an easy change to make' (because it's easy to imagine having it if you skip over the tedium of having to implement it).
Of course sometimes the ask is justified and addresses some failing of the original spec, either through lack of ambition or excess ambition that harnessed a cargo container to a lawnmower engine. But most of the conflict the article describe stems from a combination of imagining the benefits of change with the unspoken assumption that implementation is just a matter of pushing a few more buttons.
- msteffen
I love this framing. I have a lot of ideas about why this is true, but the best (IMO) pat explanation I've been able to come up with is:
1. Much of constructing software is math of a sort. In math, you write proofs that say why X is true. In software, you write code that guarantees X will be true (e.g. "the backend assumed a user ID was always available, but now that we have service accounts, we need to change the access control code so that a sensible view is still returned")
2. Math is hard, and most of the work is invisible thinking. If you asked a mathematician for an estimate on when the Reimann hypothesis will be proved, they would laugh at you. Our problems are generally easier, but they can still be hard. And as in math, they're sometimes much harder than you expect (e.g. Fermat's Last Theorem. "Why was it so hard? Did you talk to Fermat? He left? But he said it would be easy!")