[joe_the_user]

I liked the way you showed the problem as ongoing in history. Indeed, the phrase "software crisis" is nice because it references the first point when the situation was articulated.

That said, I think the reason the situation is not going to change is clearly economic. That's not saying that bad software is cheaper. But there's a strong incentive to cheap, bad practices because cutting corners allows one person/organization to save money now with the (greater) costs being picked by the organization itself later, the organization's customers and society at large. Moreover, software isn't amendable to the standards of other sorts of engineering and so there's no way to have contracts or regulations demanding software of a certain standard or quality.

Edit: The only imaginable solution would be a technological revolution that allowed cheaper and better software with same technology also not allowing even cheaper and worse software.

[jrochkind1]

Yes to this.

Lately I feel like we have built a society with expansive software infrastructure, where that software is doomed to be crappy and inhumane because our society actually couldn't afford to build this quantity of software well.

So another hypothetical fantasy solution would be a lot less software, like being careful about where we used software, using it in fewer places, so that we could collectively afford to make that careful intentional software higher quality.

Certainly a society like that would look very different, both in terms of the outcome and in terms of a society that is capable of making and executing a decision to do that.

[danhon]

Our society / societies may well be able to afford to build this quantity of software well. We choose not to.

[jrochkind1]

I don't know how/haven't seen an attempt to approach this question by a method other than "my hunch", but as a software engineer "my hunch" is it would cost at least 10-50x as much human labor (not just engineers but designer and UX researchers as well as all the other support roles like project managers etc) to build the software "well" (including more customization for individual enterprises or uses), and that it would become an unsustainable portion of the GDP.

Just "my hunch", but one I reflect on a lot these days.

[joe_the_user]

You could easily reduce the amount of software that exists today by 10-50x and have an adequate amount of software for virtually all purposes.

But this incredibly hypothetical. A lot of software labor today revolving around manipulating the user rather than aiding them so where we'd go with "better" versions of this is hard to say.

[denton-scratch]

> (not just engineers but designer and UX researchers as well as all the other support roles like project managers etc)

Oh! I thought you were going to say "testing teams, design reviewers, trainers".

I'm not on-board with this "10-50x" claim for the amount of effort. I'd say maybe 3x the effort, given the developers have been well-trained, the methodology is sound, and the managers' focus is exclusively quality. That last item is one I've never experienced; the closest I came was on a banking project where the entire development team was subordinated to the Head of Testing.

[WJW]

Humanity could easily afford to provide proper healthcare and schooling for every person on the planet if we didn't spend so much money on our collective militaries too, but "we" don't.

Getting everybody (or even a minority of any sufficient size) to act in service to a single goal has been a problem for humanity ever since we first invented society.

[gibbitz]

What doesn't get spent on quality goes down as profit. This is why we have fake mobile games. Vaporware is the real software crisis.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

It's not just about cost it's about survival. If I fail the generate revenue in a reasonable timeframe, I can't put food on the table. If I have a healthy income, I'm happy to tinker on the the technology ad infinitum.

[coooolbear]

This state of affairs is very much due to competition (instead of cooperation) and the feast-and-famine shape of what software invention and development looks like, especially in the US.

It takes time and effort to optimize software for performance, user-friendliness, developer-friendliness and everything that ethical and mindful developers hold up so highly, but that’s not the kind of thing that the big money or academic prestige is very interested in. The goal is to get the most users possible to participate in something that doesn’t repulse them and ideally draws them in. The concerns of ethics, dignity, and utility are just consequences to settle, occasionally dealt with before the world raises a stink about it, but are hardly ever part of the M.O.

Imagine if developers could make a dignified living working to listen to people and see what they really need or want and can focus on that instead of having to come up with a better ‘feature set’ than their competitors. It’s essentially why we have hundreds of different Dr. Pepper ripoffs sold as ‘alternatives’ to Dr. Pepper (is this really a good use of resources?) instead of making the best Dr. Pepper or finding a way to tailor the base Dr. Pepper to the consumers taste, assuming enough people claim they want a different Dr. Pepper.