[somnic]

Hubris with regards to urban planning is hardly unique to programmers. Planning boards and transit authorities and city councils and everyone who's got opinions on those things is intervening, and sometimes messing things up. Cities are not in some romantic state-of-nature where everything is organic and bottom-up and intervening risks destroying the ecology.

Between fatalism and high modernism, there's room to actually improve things on the margins, check to see how it's going, and iterate.

[idontknowtech]

Completely agree that hubris in this area isn't unique to programmers. I'm an architect, and plenty of architects have developed some truly idiotic ideas for ideal cities. Corbusier's plan for Paris was to level it and replace it with skyscrapers.

What bugs me is that the programmers of today seem to think they can optimize everything. Not only are they incapable, they're simply unqualified. At least professional urban planners have studied the topic in depth. Google throwing an engineering team at cities is just ridiculous. Might as well poll dentists on the best way to build software.

[brailsafe]

I think you've articulated your point quite succinctly.

> Might as well poll dentists on the best way to build software.

A programmer with hubris would take VC money to "make better dental software" never having met a dentist or having done any dental work, perhaps only ever taken a scant look over at the monitor and deciding it's not fast enough or whatever. Then they'd build an MVP, try and sell it to some clinics, and upon being laughed out the door, would take more VC money to try and reinvent dentistry because their parents never told them "no"

[Terr_]

I wonder if some of that is not so much individual hubris as a corporate issue of "if you have hammer, everything looks like a nail."

[hot_gril]

Plenty of leaders in charge of SWEs will screw up software by itself, let alone a city. Usually because they fail to realize that software mirrors the org chart (Conway's Law).