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smokel ◴[] No.37968979[source]
I'm sometimes a bit ashamed of the IT sector as a whole. I have been programming professionally for more than 20 years, but I have not seen much improvement in time to delivery. For each step forward, we seem to be taking two steps back. I can't blame the developers, but I wonder who to blame instead.

The first suspect is: the internet. It may seem like a great invention, but having machines connected at all times, without formal restrictions, results in terrible security problems. Which have to be fixed. Which takes enormous amounts of time.

The second one is related to that, and that is the idea that we have to continuously upgrade everything to the latest fad. As one consequence, we are somehow stuck with a weird common ground for user interfaces defined by web browsers, which leads to overly complex software.

What most people often want is just a push button to send a message to some other system. Both companies and governments alike seem to be paying billions of dollars for that. Because it is all so extremely complex, and people are somehow buying that.

My understanding is that the industry is happy making a lot of money, so there could be limited incentive to change things for the better. However, for some other odd reason, most ordinary people try to avoid technology like the plague, and pride themselves in not understanding how computers work, yet unknowingly spend a big percentage of their tax money on exactly that lack of understanding.

I am still extremely thankful for the likes of Richard Stallman for starting the free software movement. Unfortunately, delivering software is only one (small) part of the problem. Embedding computers in human processes is a whole different ballgame. Can we perhaps have some kind of "free management foundation" as well?

I actually reread the above rant, and I fear for the downvotes, but perhaps someone understands what I am on about and has a good tip to ease my mind.

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1. alanfranz ◴[] No.37969041[source]
> but I have not seen much improvement in time to delivery.

Is this true, by the way, or it’s just our hedonistic treadmill?

Nowadays it’s extra fast to deliver and serve a lot of functionalities worldwide. Thing that would require a dev team are handled by a free saas out of the box.

But our implied non-functional requirements have grown exponentially. Twenty years ago, if a business critical software was offline for one day a month, it wasn’t a big issue. Today, if Facebook is offline for an hour it’ll make headlines on major newspapers.

Expectations just evolved. And writing working software over multiple layers of mess is as difficult as ever. “Precise estimation” is just a misnomer.

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2. verve_rat ◴[] No.37972828[source]
And the expectation that every business should act like they are facebook.

No, if your system goes off line for 20 hours a year barely anyone will notice, it will have way, way less impact to your business than spending the money to make sure that doesn't happen.