The insanity of being a software engineer

Software gets more complicated. All of this complexity is there for a reason. But what happened to specializing? When a house is being built, tons of people are involved: architects, civil engineers, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, interior designers, roofers, surveyors, pavers, you name it. You don’t expect a single person, or even a whole single company, to be able to do all of those.
↫ Vitor M. de Sousa Pereira

I’ve always found that software development gets a ton of special treatment and leeway in quality expectations, and this has allowed the kind of stuff the linked article is writing about to become the norm. Corporations can demand so much from developers and programmers to the point where expecting quality is wholly unreasonable, because there’s basically no consequences for delivering a shit product. Bugs, crashes, security issues, lack of documentation, horrid localisation – it’s all par for the course in software, yet we would not tolerate any of that in almost any other type of product.

While I’m sure some of this can be attributed to developers themselves, most of it seems to stem from incompetent managers imposing impossible deadlines downwards and setting unrealistic expectations upwards – you know, kick down, lick up – creating a perfect storm of incompetence. We all know it, we all experience it every day, and we all hate it – but we’ve just accepted it. As consumers, as developers, as regulatory bodies.

It’s too late to fix this now. Software development will forever exist as a sort of no man’s land of quality expectations, free from regulations, warranties, and consumer protections, and imposing them now after the fact is never going to be accepted by the industry and won’t ever make it through any lawmaking process of any country, and we all suffer from it, both as users of software and as makers of it.