| > The upper bounds of complexity are higher in software than construction. It's not narcissism, it's just the nature of that kind of work. It's a wonder that it works so well in fact. I think software is probably the most complex and difficult engineering humans undertake. If you think of all the ways that a program can crash, compute incorrect results, and generally go wrong -- it's amazing that it even works at all let alone that in practice it works so well. And we don't even have a widely accepted body of knowledge, capital-P professional obligations, liability, etc. We constantly hire people with no formal training, give them no formal training, and make no expectations of their expertise. We hire them for lots of money and put them in front of important projects and we promote them up. It's almost unreal. Talk to a civil engineer or a doctor about what it took them to enter their profession and the amount of work they have to put in to maintain their license. And they get paid less than most software engineers. And yet it's still somewhat unbelievable. Digging tunnels requires a lot of expertise and domain knowledge but as others have mentioned: there are only so many rocks out there to encounter. Once you have a thorough survey there are scant few unexpected problems you might run into. But computing? Well... unless there's a battle-tested library that solves the exact problem you have then you're basically solving the problem from scratch. And one mistake is all it takes. You can't just add an extra I-beam or use a stronger steel... there's no fudge-factor in discrete systems. The whole enterprise of computing is managing complexity -- we have whole fields dedicated to the study of complexity with plenty of unsolved problems! I believe it is just the nature of the work and why it remains so infuriatingly difficult to predict outcomes. My pet response when someone asks why estimating software is hard: you've lost your keys in your house. give me an estimate on how long you think it will take to find them. I know you're going to think that if the keys are in the usual place it will take less than a minute. But if they're not... If you check all the places you might've been in the last few hours, maybe 5 minutes. But if they're not there then you'll have to think about how to search your whole house which could take hours. And what if you still don't find them? And on and on. |