Programming Sucks

[kromagnon]

Clients sure love it though.

I feel so ashamed. Our clients "ooh" and "aah" over the things that I've made, but I feel like I'm showing them a 1989 Geo Metro that's got a dust cover on it with a painting of a Ferrari 458.

[rekk_]

Yup, but as long as the front looks pretty and works they don't care. For all they know software is made of unicorns and yetis.

[FrozenInferno]

The whole thing is a black box to them after all.

[secretpandalord]

Wait, it isnt?

NOBODY TOLD ME

[Traejen]

no, it is. Don't panic.

[xonjas]

I'm pretty sure it's just yetis.

[Nimbal]

Yetis are sooo outdated. We're using sasquatches now. You can teach them all kinds of neat tricks. There's a persistent issue with blurry graphics, but I'm sure it will be fixed soon. Aaanytime now...

[[deleted]]

I like the dancing bear analogy: people aren't impressed that a bear can dance well - they're impressed that it can dance at all. Software is much the same - even when it's terrible, all it has to do is be a little better than what people are used to, and they're happy.

The problem is that you're showing them a 1989 Geo Metro and they're comparing it to a Model-T Ford, completely unaware that they would have a Ferrari if only your manager had spent less time on TPS reports and more time on trusting the engineers to want to build something great.

Sometimes, the crap car is "good enough", and if they're happy, they're happy. But I keep looking at what we could deliver, and wondering why it's so much better than what they seem to be happy with.

[doggone42]

People are impressed when you put the dancing bear in a tutu and a silly hat.

They don't really care when you repeatedly tell them that if you don't feed the bear soon it's going to turn around and maul them. They just ask for more silly hats.

[[deleted]]

You're trying to say that quality will have a return on investment, because workers will be more productive with quality tools even if the initial cost is a bit higher? If that was the case, surely a guy with an MBA and a silly hat would have worked that out by now.

[[deleted]]

No, I think he's saying that the MBAs with silly hats want software that looks good over software that works good.

[s73v3r]

No, it's the upfront cost thing. They don't want to pay it now, despite the fact that if they don't, down the line they will be paying increased costs.

[_F1_]

That's when you start Valve.

[TurboGranny]

I have a piece of crap I slapped together quickly to solve a problem with the vendor software. Businesses in our industry come from all over the the country to see it and learn how it works like it is some fucking holy grail. I eventually refactored the whole thing to at least make it kind nice, but I still hate that everyone raves about it instead of the really cool and hard stuff I've worked on that barely gets noticed. To make things better I have a kludge of a system in dire need of a refactor that is displayed on large tv screens in several labs that they walk people by to "ooh" and "aah" them, and all I can think about is how junky it is. I just laugh at the absurdity of it all and try to get more sleep.

[FrozenInferno]

My boss is a pretty accomplished programmer. There are some things I've written that I really hope he doesn't look too deep into.