[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.