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Chances of people dying from my web app is super slim. Chances of people dying because I bladly wired their house is and it caught fire is a lot higher.

Chances of me dying while developing my web app is super slim. Chances of someone frying themselves with wiring something up when they don't know how is a lot higher.

discuss

black_puppydog|5 years ago

chances of being miserable in an administrative job^W^Wordinary life because some software product you have to use is making your job worse rather than better are close to 100%.

If you only count deaths, yeah, bad programming has negligible impact maybe. If you extend it to general suffering, it's quite a drag on everyone actually. And incidentally, good programming can make a world of a difference, too.

So wanting to select for good programming, with even just having a good minimal standard, is a reasonable goal.

The problem is that we're not even sure what makes good programmers and how to spot them, as evidenced by the continuous stream of "I think..." and "Well actually" stories & comments here on HN.

luckylion|5 years ago

Is bad programming a net negative? I'm not convinced (and it's not just because I'm a bad programmer, I swear!), I think if you only had good programming, you'd have very little programming and that would be concentrated of the areas that the powers that be deem most important: military, finance, police, factories.

Having bad programming gets you a lot of programming. I'd rather have a million people who can each build a house a day that will stand reasonably reliable for ten years than having a thousand people that can each build a house a day that will stand for a hundred years.

b20000|5 years ago

I will leave this right here for your education - https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-ariane-5-disaster

bigwavedave|5 years ago

GP doesn't say it's never happened, just that the typical programmer isn't going to kill someone with a buggy password complexity validator. By and large, the standard programmer does not hold life and death in their hands when navigating callback hell.

henryfjordan|5 years ago

To GP's point, nobody died in that disaster. A much better example would have been the Therac-25: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

TwistedWeasel|5 years ago

web apps are a small fraction of the software development world. Software Engineers are responsible for code that runs in hospitals, aircraft, power switching stations, and many many other safety critical systems. In many cases code that was never written for safety critical work is deployed in those environments. What OS and software runs the elevator controls in a hospital or military base? We never know the real impact of our work.

nemo44x|5 years ago

That's really not true. At NASA for example there are standards that need to be followed when designing a system, implementing the code for it, reviewing and testing it, and releasing it. [1]

Yes there will always be bugs but no practice or method is invulnerable to this.

Software in general, in these high risk environments, has been extraordinarily successful in terms of reliability and safety.

[1] https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/software-assurance/2019...

amelius|5 years ago

Unless, for example, you're writing software for civil engineers ...