SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
An outrageous, insightful, and sadly accurate commentary on programming. I found this an extremely entertaining read and agree with most of it. It doesn't offer solutions, but certainly highlights a lot of the problems.
"Double you tee eff?" you say, and start hunting for the problem. You discover that one day, some idiot decided that since another idiot decided that 1/0 should equal infinity, they could just use that as a shorthand for "Infinity" when simplifying their code. Then a non-idiot rightly decided that this was idiotic, which is what the original idiot should have decided, but since he didn't, the non-idiot decided to be a dick and make this a failing error in his new compiler. Then he decided he wasn't going to tell anyone that this was an error, because he's a dick, and now all your snowflakes are urine and you can't even find the cat.
Personally, I think things will only get better (including salaries) when software development is treated like other engineering disciplines.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 01 2014, @03:04PM
Not to mention that if your code fails, you lose your license to make a living. If it causes damage, you go to jail.
It may seem harsh, but that is the way it is for real engineers. From the view of an Information Assurance manager, the most dangerous threat is not hackers, or terrorists, or APTs, or the NSA, or competitors, it is programmers. The vast majority of security flaws are found in code, not in implementation where they should be. Until programmers are held accountable for their own failures, intentional or not, they will be regarded as nothing more than very expensive keyboard pounders by PHBs, and rightfully so.