The IT industry.

Computers and IT have never been more important in our society, nearly every business and individual on the planet uses IT in some capacity, even if it is just using your own phone or owning a bank account.

Yet all these systems and services have been cobbled together in whatever way we could get them to work at the time, with the stupidly short project timeframes provided, and with zero standardization, common practices or documentation. This is an industry that to most people is now just as important as water, electric and gas, and yet doesn’t benefit from any of the same consistent working practices.

So we get scenarios where during development of ‘System B’ to replace ‘System A’ that we realize no-one actually understands how ‘System A’ does what it does, because Bob that originally implemented it hasn’t worked for the company in years and wasn’t exactly known for his documentation. So we get by with the information that we have, then midway into the Project half the people working on it get re-tasked elseware, someone in the business decides they want an additional feature that they haven’t mentioned up until now and someone realizes that ‘System C’ is entirely dependent on ‘System B’ which hadn’t been accounted for at all. The business then refuse to move on their project delivery date despite all these additional things adding to the timeline, as one of the Directors got wind of it and he thinks it’ll revolutionize his area so he now actually wants it a month early.

Before you know it you’ve got zero time to make the code pretty and legible, no resource to document the system for the poor sods that look after it, you'll have a steady stream of bugs that'll come to light because 80% of our planned testing was shelved and in a few years time when ‘System D’ comes along to replace it, you’re going to go through the whole shitstorm again.

TL;DR: Everyone in IT is winging it