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And this sort of thing is why I'm against the idea strongly. The first thing that people think when they think about this sort of thing is that we have to drag in extremely heavyweight "better engineering", blind to the major differences between programming and other engineering. What if an architect could specify an entire skyscraper, push a button, and have it manifest in the real world in 30 seconds? What if they could slightly tweak something about the plumbing, push the button again, and have the old thing torn down and the new building put up? What if they could push another button to put 10 times the rated mass on every floor to see what happens? What if they could push another button to summon an 8.3 magnitude earthquake for ten minutes? What if they could write a for loop that did that for every .1 magnitude increment, ten times a day, until the building collapses, and gathered statistics on which buildings do the best? Do you think maybe this would affect their design process a bit? Maybe just a little? If you stop and seriously think about it, you should expect that programmers have a very different optimum design methodology. It would be crazy if we didn't! Now, there are good practices and there are bad practices, and the bad practices are more widespread than they should be, and there are cowboys where there should be engineers. However, based on the prevalence of posts like this, I have little confidence in the ability of a "professional organization" to improve things. It seems based on the evidence far, far more likely to mandate counterproductive practices that make software more expensive, less reliable, and harder for the disadvantaged and underprivileged to get into. Don't be envious of the other engineering disciplines. They envy us. |
They shouldn't. Our work is deplorable. Any non-trivial internal codebase would probably give any mathematically savvy engineer nightmares for days. If our office buildings were designed as needlessly hastily the software designed inside them, having our tech hub in an earthquake hotspot would be a serious issue.
Yes, there is something to be said about the convenience of our "agile"/rapid-development cycle, but it's not like we use that power responsibly. We have enough decades-old codebases that have been in a perpetual state of 'fragile legacy-code' since they were first written, that prove that we don't take our designs seriously enough to improve them despite all our conveniences. If building engineers suddenly had access to some magical 'easy-bake oven' for building skyscraper MVP's and making 'agile' changes, I know I'd be concerned, looking back at our track record with software.