The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

(thedailywtf.com)

449 points lemper | 1 comments | 27 Aug 25 06:57 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source

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ChrisMarshallNY ◴[27 Aug 25 13:13 UTC] No.45039231[source]▶

I worked for hardware manufacturers for most of my career, as a software guy.

In my experience, hardware people really dis software. It's hard to get them to take it seriously.

When something like this happens, they tend to double down on shading software.

I have found it very, very difficult to get hardware people to understand that software has a different ruleset and workflow, from hardware. They interpret this as "cowboy software," and think we're trying to weasel out of structure.

replies(2): >>45040043 #>>45044897 #

kccqzy ◴[27 Aug 25 20:38 UTC] No.45044897[source]▶

>>45039231 #

Hardware designers benefit from having multiple separate teams to test their product. A chip designer can rely on at least two other teams to test the designed chip, and one of them will be using formal verification. If software also has long release cycles and high cost to remedy mistakes, you bet we would also have multiple testers. In fact that was what happened in the 90s with shrink wrapped software and without easy updates.

replies(1): >>45045762 #

1. ChrisMarshallNY ◴[27 Aug 25 21:50 UTC] No.45045762[source]▶

>>45044897 #

That was the case for the company that I worked at.

The official QA organization was very powerful, and had no compunctions about stopping an entire product line, for one bug.

When that happened, the department responsible for the bug would find themselves against the wall.

As a result, all the software departments had pretty big teams of testers, who would validate the software, before it was released to the purview of the QA organization.

It could be pretty restricting, but we always felt confident that what we shipped, worked.

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