https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1105256560794763264?s=19i think about this sentiment a lot in re the story i found some months ago, the memoirs of the guy who pushed to computerize the mills at International Paper for the first time, in the seventies
archive.org/details/dual-r… it's this here, and it's a great read, but I think the guy's pride in his accomplishment blinded him to how asinine the described experience actually is
from what i can tell he was an old school engineer before all this, someone who knew how the processes actually worked. the person who's supposed to be the antidote to rampant softwareitis. but that's not how it played out.
there's stories in there about fantastically expensive mill stoppages caused by a programmer playing fiddledicks with the production system, when they should have had a rigid checklist system in place to prevent exactly that. but software makes people's world very tiny
you're not working on a machine that occupies an entire building; you're On The Computer, the fun toy, the brainteaser, the puzzle, the chess game you complete at a leisurely pace, just you against old man Logic
he says that there were times when the old old timers -the guys who were even more Classical Engineer than he was - insulted him, and one told him he was going to destroy the company. he brushed this off. he shouldn't have. he got lucky and he got leeway.
the story is basically a series of disasters, all caused by inexpertise. things that would not have happened if this had not been a software project, because computers just don't fucking stay still, and they're too opaque and complicated to understand
the whole "move fast break things" is because we don't know how NOT to break things with software. "bug free" is an ancient joke, something nobody takes seriously. there are bug-free bridges, towers and dams though.
pretty much the only code in the world that is trusted not to have errors is avionics and there is literally a theory floating right now that a 737 avionics bug killed a lot of people
software crashes and fucks up. it isn't trustworthy. it's a force multiplier beyond anything else in existence, because it goes from zero to catastrophe so fast, and often so quietly, that nobody knows until it's too fucking late
programs don't develop cracks. you can't instrument them to see if they're slowly breaking and then evacuate before anyone gets hurt
you can't even inspect it. Amazon has no idea what's in their databases. an audit would be impossible
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