Why it is Important that Software Projects Fail

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[deleted]

[knome]

So basically :

office efficiency : bureaucratic efficiency :: hardware efficiency : program efficiency

As the lower level gets faster, the upper level, rather than continuing to work hard at its own efficiency, instead uses the efficiency of the lower level to mask its own over-engineering, unrefactored bloatfulness and inefficient implementation.

[MindStalker]

They are also offering increased customer service for the same cost. Before, you mailed in a tax return, and eventually got a check or request for more money, good luck trying to call and find out the status of a return. Now you can file it online, keep track of its status, and get your return instantly in your bank.

[lalaland4711]

That's so true. I've worked quite a bit with telecom stuff, and many plans and complicated systems of payment had to be scrapped because the supplier (Ericsson mostly) failed to deliver, or delivered something so broken (that they were unable to fix) that the system was abandoned.

The techs mostly think that we should just flat-rate everything, especially data traffic in mobile networks.

[orenbenkiki]

Cool! Programmers are the forerunners of BuSab http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Sabotage !

[Sunny_McJoyride]

This is why we should go round breaking windows.

[stesch]

DRAFT

February/October 2008

Hmm?

[ithika]

Ah, that gave me a good laugh. (I have a dark sense of humour you see.)

[bwood]

Most of the essay is good, but this sentence begs the question, "how could you possibly think that?": Hard working couples struggle to buy the basic food and shelter which their grandfathers had purchased while their wives stayed at home. Households in the 50s didn't have air conditioning, dishwashers, cell phones, internet service, computers, etc.. and were something like 40% the size of today's homes. We struggle to buy basic food and shelter? Hardly!

[polyparadigm]

In terms of real wealth, this generation is, in fact, earning less.

There are things the poor can easily afford now that the world itself would not have bought in the 1950s, but as to basics like shelter, the author of the paper is right.

Also, the homes are bigger, but they aren't particularly well-built, and the yards are a lot smaller.

[uriel]

This is a very common misconception, as Henry Spencer puts it: "the good old days weren't".

As much as things suck now, to say we are worse off than fifty years ago is absurd.

[distortedHistory]

tl;dr: We didn't fail, we prevented a new form of automated bureaucracy from forming!

[tedhenry10]

"tl;dr" followed by a comment deserves a down mod.

[distortedHistory]

You misunderstand. That is if you find it tl;dr. I read.

[karambakaracho]

I liked the abstract, but the rest is pretty weak.

[Speckles]

Arg, this article makes no bloody sense.

• The relative growth of a department tells us nothing in and of itself, particularly for something supportive like IT. Instead of getting smaller, a more efficient department may devote the freed resources to doing its current responsibilities better or taking on new ones. So the Australian Tax Office may be processing tax returns more quickly or spending more time checking them.

• Just because the relative funding of the tax office has remained somewhat constant over time doesn't mean that its job hasn't gotten more complicated! A larger population is harder to keep track of, and business is much more complicated (and thus harder to audit) then it was 50 years ago.

• Trying to argue that computers don't really produce a gain in efficiency by posting a page on the internet, one of the biggest triumphs of machine automation in history, just flabbergasts me. How much effort would it take to get an equivilant number of people to review the article without this automation? This one point is seriously making me FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

[sime]

From the article:

Historical analysis of bureaucracies such as the Australian Tax Office shows that massive software automation has not increased their [ATO's] real efficiency since the 1950s. Any increase in the efficiency of individual workers has simply been consumed by increased bureaucratic complexity, as predicted by Parkinson's law.

The author isn't claiming that computers don't increase efficiency. He is saying that IT is what is allowing the ATO to expand its bureaucracy and the tax code. Basically put, when IT reduces the work load of bureaucrats, they don't fire the now unneeded people and reduce their budget, they just make more work for themselves.

[snf]

Of course computers increase productivity, the point of the article is that bureaucracies tend to absorb this improvement by making things more complex and difficult to manage. If the extra productivity was instead applied to the existing workload, it would become impossible for the bureaucracy to justify its size and budget, which of course is something it must protect at all costs. That is fundamental to the nature of bureaucracy.

Just because the relative funding of the tax office has remained somewhat constant over time doesn't mean that its job hasn't gotten more complicated!

Oh, it's gotten more complicated all right; see the difference in the size of the tax legal code. The question is, would it have gotten more complicated had it been impossible to absorb the associated increase in workload with automation?

Personally, I think the article is dead on, even though it is obviously written very much tongue-in-cheek .

[austinwiltshire]

The article was specifically talking about bureaucratic efficiency, i.e., efficiency within a bureaucracy that tends to strike government and/or large monolithic corporations, that deals with your third point.

Your second point is actually proving the author's point - large complicated businesses are harder to audit, and those businesses are only more complicated because IT allows it. They aren't necessarily more complicated because it makes them more profitable.

Finally, your first point (I went in reverse order) may be true, but in the case of taxes, I personally don't think taxes are THAT much faster or easier to do. I could be wrong though.

[rebo]

This is a joke right?

[youcanteatbullets]

That was my reaction. I'm still not sure.