[nwallin]

> Honestly it’s hard to refute the fact that we need roads and houses more than we need cat videos.

If the software made by my company ceased to exist, every government in the US, federal, state, and municipal, every construction company, plus most governments worldwide would be unable to build roads or houses until they were able to cobble together a replacement.

The entire world runs on software. Software controls our banks, flies our planes, decides what happens when you press the brake pedal in your car. The bridges you drive, walk, or ride across were modeled in software and simulated to determine whether they needed to be built stronger. The power companies use software to route power across the grid. Software drives servos which determine how much natural gas and air get pumped into our power plants. Every day, power producers and power consumers bid on how much they will pay for electricity at certain times tomorrow, and all of that is automated by software. Judges and lawyers file motions electronically, routed through software. Two weeks ago, US President Donald Trump, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed a memorandum of understanding, opening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump was in Versaille, Pezeshkian was in Tehran, Sharif was in Islamabad; the agreement was signed digitally, with software.

If every computer on earth stopped working tomorrow, we wouldn't notice the lack of cat videos, but we would notice the complete collapse of civilization.

[chirau]

As a 'software engineer' myself, I fully understand your position, but please qualify the statement about the software you work on. Either add 'efficiently' or 'at scale', because all that infrastructure you mentioned could definitely be built without your software. It was possible before your software and it sure would be possible without it, it just would not be as easy.

I am sure someone is going to dwell on that if not fixed.

[maccard]

This is silly. People survived before the Haber Bosch process but an overnight removal of it from the world would absolutely result in a catastrophic collapse.

If you want to be reductive, we’re all going to die due to entropy anyway, it will all balance out so there’s no point in doing anything at all.

[miki123211]

Internet is now critical infrastructure, whether we like it or not.

We've quietly gone from it being a research project, to a cool toy, to something most people had but that definitely wasn't essential, to a world where it is just as crucial as lightning or electricity.

I bet many farming and food distribution operations just wouldn't be able to function without a connection to AWS.

[rfrey]

If the toilets at all those firms started operating in reverse, very little would get built. The conclusion is that plumbers are extremely important, not that plumbing is de facto engineering.

[falsemyrmidon]

Plumbers build all the pipes, but one of the aforementioned professional engineers created a drawing of where they would go and how the water and sewage would move through the building.

[27183]

And crucially, independent regulatory bodies formed the building codes[0] which govern things like minimum acceptable pitch for waste lines, size and materials selection of pipes, acceptable pressures and temperatures, etc. Engineers can be held responsible for failing to design to these codes, and plumbers and other tradespersons can be held responsible for failing to build to them.

IMO what we really need in software is something like the various codes which govern fire safety, efficiency, etc of modern buildings. It exists in some safety critical domains but should be more widely applied.

The safety codes are where we accumulate the hard-won knowledge over time. Many of the rules in the codes were paid for with human lives lost.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Code_Council

[chucksmash]

Your company's software enhances the process somehow, making it easier or faster or cheaper. Your company's software did not unlock the technology of road building.

There were roads built before your company's software and I'm sure if your company disappeared that ultimately roads would get built with or without their software.

It would be interesting to look at all the technological advances of the last 60 years and break them down into categories based on what happens if they went away though (category A: the field just goes back to 1950s and we more or less get by vs Category B: society utterly collapses).

[miki123211]

It's less about whether we could live without it, more about whether we could live without it now.

We objectively don't need credit cards. We could do with cash just fine. If we were told that Visa / Mastercard were shutting down in 5 years, we'd manage to muddle through. If they suddenly vanished off the face of the Earth? People would definitely die due to starvation.

[abustamam]

It's fun to do it forwards too (ie all recent technological advances that could be category a where society cannot live without it or category b where society is like meh or even category c where soecity utterly collapses because of it).

The internet as a whole can arguably be all three at the same time.