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I'm still kind of haunted by this very concise and blunt argument by 'jcranmer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22315607

(I hadn't read about the KC Hyatt disaster before).




The Hyatt accident was a pretty massive screwup. There are other examples. See, e.g. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2014/04/17/the_citicorp_t...

OTOH, Heartbleed had as much to do with critical open source code being maintained by someone who was basically doing on a shoestring via donations as a lack of software engineering processes in general.


It's not so much Heartbleed; I agree, that was kind of sui generis. It's just the more general sense in which our field has no guardrails to prevent people from opting for faster/cheaper time to market at the expense of security and reliability. Everyone in this industry is constantly drilling holes through the support beams and hanging whole new floors off them; the buildings collapse every week, and we just shrug.

I'm not even saying things must necessarily change. I'm just making the case that what we're doing isn't engineering.




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