[black_puppydog]

chances of being miserable in an administrative job^W^Wordinary life because some software product you have to use is making your job worse rather than better are close to 100%.

If you only count deaths, yeah, bad programming has negligible impact maybe. If you extend it to general suffering, it's quite a drag on everyone actually. And incidentally, good programming can make a world of a difference, too.

So wanting to select for good programming, with even just having a good minimal standard, is a reasonable goal.

The problem is that we're not even sure what makes good programmers and how to spot them, as evidenced by the continuous stream of "I think..." and "Well actually" stories & comments here on HN.

[luckylion]

Is bad programming a net negative? I'm not convinced (and it's not just because I'm a bad programmer, I swear!), I think if you only had good programming, you'd have very little programming and that would be concentrated of the areas that the powers that be deem most important: military, finance, police, factories.

Having bad programming gets you a lot of programming. I'd rather have a million people who can each build a house a day that will stand reasonably reliable for ten years than having a thousand people that can each build a house a day that will stand for a hundred years.

[brlewis]

> Having bad programming gets you a lot of programming

This is true. I'll add that machine learning is arguably the computer doing a lot of bad programming.