> It daunts me how much software is getting unreliable, but trying to shame people to hold them accountable is naive.
> The root of the problem is the uncontrolled complexity of modern software products.
I think there's a feedback loop between those two things, especially when it comes to government or giant corporation projects. Lack of accountability causes accidental complexity, which in turn causes a lack of accountability.
It starts with a organisation that lacks tech leadership hiring a consultancy, which then treats the project as a "flagship engagement" which means trying to make everything perfect, where perfect is used in the context of the number of future sales-pitches that will cite this one project.
As a result, there's a gap between what the organisation needs and what it gets, which adds to the amount of work required and complexity to navigate, whenever changes are required, and the overall complexity snowballs from there.
Most of the above is business-as-usual for most very expensive projects. The real danger-zone is when you get to the third iteration, six or seven years down the line, and you're forced to re-hire the first consultancy again because they're the only one with the resources to take it on; but the tech-world has moved on, so they see you as a "modernisation engagement". They simultaneously can't criticise their own bad decisions from several years prior, but at the same time they want the wider-industry to see their "transformative" power, so can't merely iterate on what's already there either.
That's how you end up with iOS apps, talking to Ruby-on-Rails APIs (which used to be the primary web-app, before that was replaced with a React frontend), reading and writing from an Oracle database which is also updated with a series of batch jobs dating back to early 2000s Java EE.
The "coal face" developers in all these situations have done the best work to their ability, and quite often achieved minor miracles in stability given the underlying complexity. The problem is always a management (or lack-of management) problem.
> The root of the problem is the uncontrolled complexity of modern software products.
I think there's a feedback loop between those two things, especially when it comes to government or giant corporation projects. Lack of accountability causes accidental complexity, which in turn causes a lack of accountability.
It starts with a organisation that lacks tech leadership hiring a consultancy, which then treats the project as a "flagship engagement" which means trying to make everything perfect, where perfect is used in the context of the number of future sales-pitches that will cite this one project.
As a result, there's a gap between what the organisation needs and what it gets, which adds to the amount of work required and complexity to navigate, whenever changes are required, and the overall complexity snowballs from there.
Most of the above is business-as-usual for most very expensive projects. The real danger-zone is when you get to the third iteration, six or seven years down the line, and you're forced to re-hire the first consultancy again because they're the only one with the resources to take it on; but the tech-world has moved on, so they see you as a "modernisation engagement". They simultaneously can't criticise their own bad decisions from several years prior, but at the same time they want the wider-industry to see their "transformative" power, so can't merely iterate on what's already there either.
That's how you end up with iOS apps, talking to Ruby-on-Rails APIs (which used to be the primary web-app, before that was replaced with a React frontend), reading and writing from an Oracle database which is also updated with a series of batch jobs dating back to early 2000s Java EE.
The "coal face" developers in all these situations have done the best work to their ability, and quite often achieved minor miracles in stability given the underlying complexity. The problem is always a management (or lack-of management) problem.