Software crisis - healthcare.gov is just the dead canary

[Sam1]

It has been a good generation to be involved with software. The scarcity of the skillset combined with the demand for the output have generated outsized incomes, while the work has been consistently rewarding. Our quirky group of builders has had an outsized influence on our industries, not to mention our culture and ideals. But that influence is looking less benign as the rigid procedures of computing are changing commercial relationships and the application of the law.

In our prehistory, the 50s, 60s and into the 70s, there were at first a handful of computers and eventually hundreds of thousands in the world. In those days data was impossible to crunch, and yet data was impossibly valuable to crunch. Any means necessary included costly, limited and ill-behaved combinations of experimental equipment. Memory was literally sewn together by hand, with a magnetic bead for each bit, and a pair of wires running through it along each axis of a grid. Longer term data would be stored on a rotating drum, and the programmer would try to time the placement of the data on the drum so that data would come around about the time it was needed. I was a teenager in the early 70s, and took a non-credit system programming course at Dartmouth when I was junior high school. But my memory of the time was writing programs with toggle switches, and not keyboard, debugging by watching lights, and patching paper tape programs with tape.

Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/11/bob-goodwin-software-engineering-in-crisis-healthcare-gov-is-just-the-dead-canary.html#UP2Bt6T1HYuqVWuD.99

[antiquie]

1. Government software is an alien.

The very elite tech companies have been a magnet for the best computer top talent for a long time. It is not this cohort that writes government software. Of course there are good engineers in every school, industry, country, and within each specialty. But there is no question that technical collaboration looks very different between engineers at a big tech company versus a contracting company writing government software. Government processes seem to always flow explicitly from written law or written policy. In other words, Government process are by definition implemented top down. But every well paid software engineer has had a lifetime of practice intimidating his bosses to let them work bottom up.