this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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I'm an engineer. When you see something really badly designed and think "wow, those engineers are so stupid! I could have done a better job myself!"
Please know that we did think about it. It's just that some guy with an MBA decides the schedule, and another guy with an MBA decides the budget, and terrible designs get released no matter how much we protest. I'm sorry we couldn't figure it out fast enough and cheap enough, though.
And yes, we do mistakes all the time too. It's just that we usually know about the obvious ones.
As a software engineer, this applies to my entire industry as well.
I'm forced to write subpar software, sometimes with atrocious security simply because some idiot set an unrealistic budget.
The worst part is, my current projects are all government funded. The German government implemented processes to prevent corruption, which force unhealthy competition and backhand corruption onto the bidders, which then churn out bad software, which causes gigantic costs down the line, because nothing works. Great job.
Excellent point about government sponsored anti corruption measures, too. Here in the US our government contracts award "points" to businesses which are minority or woman- owned.
In practice, the same construction companies simply institute shell companies, and make their wives/daughters/sisters the owners of these shell companies, charge a premium, and have the "owner" subcontract the work back to the same old company, effectively making themselves an extra 20 percent...
Small businesses (which may be minority or woman owned, but they don't play golf with the government buyers) are still totally forgotten.
Every system will get gamed by bad actors.
At least in my case, I can't come up with a system that doesn't suffer from these problems, but still keeps corruption in check.
For example, I was in a bidding process for my own software. Our contract has a legal time limit, afterwards it has to be renewed using the same bidding process as the first time. It makes perfect sense for us not to rewrite our software - it's working just fine after all. But legally, we're bidding on rebuilding the entire thing, have to compete with laughably low offers from all over Europe, and when we won the contract we decide, almost by accident, to keep using the old software, but on a very tight budget.
The pragmatic thing would have been, to just extend our contract, but that could mean endless contracts to extremely high prices for software that just happens to be embedded deep enough to be irreplaceable.
No good solution, really.
This is a completely fair point. If I were given the proverbial golden keys to rewrite bidding practices, I imagine whatever I wrote would be subject to perverse incentives of some kind.
Or the engineers have been given bad requirements and made the wrong product.
Yes, another tragedy is when sales guy from company A talks to sales guy from company B.
You want a submarine to also fly into space? Oh yeah, we can do that! Our engineers are really smart, shouldn't be a problem. We'll have that design over to you in 2 weeks!
Later, when talking to the engineering team...
Well, I don't see what's so hard about it. We've had submarines and planes in WW2, you're telling me we can't innovative and combine those ideas? Well, this is an opportunity for you guys to really show off the engineering ability of the company... And I can't move the promise date now, I already talked to him on the phone and I'm about to go on my cruise. Call me if you need anything!
Another guy with an MBA:It needs to have AI too!!! You know, like ChaTGPT. So it can reason about the world!!
Engineer: You know ChatGPT can't "reason" right?
MBA Guy: But I can tell it to autogenerate code!
Engineer: It's just finding code snippets like you could find with a search engine.
MBA: But they said it was sentient! AI!! LLMS!! SYNERGY!!
Engineer:...Nevermind. Yes, we'll build a submarine that can fly and add a chat box so you can ask it what it is thinking.
Engineer quits next day
I'm half joking, but it pains me as an engineer to admit how close to reality this can be.
Just draw 7 red lines with green inkβ¦
GET. THIS. GUY. HIS. VOTES.
Edit: The budget slayers, almost wanna punch them in the face and walk out of the office for good.