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Estimated Cost of Poor Software Quality in the U.S. in 2020: $2.1 Trillion (techrepublic.com) 118

TechRepublic shares a remarkable calculation by the not-for-profit IT leadership group the Consortium for Information and Software Security: CISQ's 2020 report, The Cost of Poor Software Quality in the U.S., looked at the financial impact of software projects that went awry or otherwise ended up leaving companies with a larger bill by creating additional headaches for them. According to the consortium, unsuccessful IT projects alone cost U.S. companies $260 billion in 2020, while software problems in legacy systems cost businesses $520 billion and software failures in operational systems left a dent of $1.56 trillion in corporate coffers.

As a result, the total cost of poor software quality in the U.S. amounted to approximately $2.08 trillion in 2020, CISQ said. Comparing this to the total U.S. IT and software wage base of $1.4 trillion, the company said the figures "underscored the magnitude of the negative economic impact of poor software quality."

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Estimated Cost of Poor Software Quality in the U.S. in 2020: $2.1 Trillion

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  • Some wonderboy gets headhunted, needs 6 months to a year to get up to date, then he gets headhunted by another company and he needs 6 months ... you see where this is going?

    When do these guys actually DO something?

    • They.collect knowledge.

      You're just falsely assuming that they ae serving the companies. But let's be honest: Why should they? It's not like the companies are blind to what's happening. If you hire sombody with no ability to do the job, you only got yourself to blame.

      And in the end, those kids are gonna end up with a lot of knowledge, and simply no need to accept posts at such dumb companies. They will know enough to run their own show. And mayby buy whatever bits of those old.companies are still worth somet

  • If - for example - a project goes over budget, it could just as easily be down to the original estimate having been garbage in order to get the project approved.
    This is just clickbait.

  • by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Sunday January 17, 2021 @12:46PM (#60955334) Homepage Journal

    pay twice!

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • On the contrary, generous budgets often lead to bloat and overdesign.

      Better to starve developers of resources to force a clean and simple design.

      • Re:buy cheap (Score:4, Insightful)

        by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Sunday January 17, 2021 @01:15PM (#60955508) Homepage Journal

        people who know what they are doing won't sign on if you:
        1. don't pay significantly for their services
        2. make them work with a bunch of highly paid people who don't know what they are doing.

        Obviously just throwing money at the problem doesn't work. But the contrary also doesn't work. It's just not that simple.

        • You missed

          3. allows you to do it well

          When it shouldnt be designed like that there isnt much anyone can do while it continues to be designed like that.

          Consider an application like Logitech's G-HUB. Even moving past the glaring UI principles that are violated, the whole UI structure defies the structure of the intrinsic dataset that it is an editor for. The programmers should have said no it shouldnt be done like that because if we do it like that then we need to maintain an extra highly complicated sta
      • Regarding "bloat", you can either:

        A) Limit the scope of the project to only what can be done at high quality within the budget.

        B) Starve the project of resources to ensure that it can't be done properly.

        One option leads to small, streamlined software that does one thing very well.

        The other option leads to a large pile of shit.

        Software is like constructing a building or hiring a team or anything else. For a given budget, you can either get a smaller quantity of high quality, or you can get a bigger pile of

      • Good Luck ;) 30+ years as an independent developer and still going @ 65.
    • Yeah, except you cannot afford to invest in the long term because you just ain't got he money to spend.
      This is why being poor is so expensive, and you get stuck.
      Those with a lot of money just have the option to choose better deals.
      Funny how that goes.

      So I suggest curbing your smugness.
      I'm not buying cheap crap because I have a choice.
      I would never buy cheap crap and whenever I actually have a choice, I know better than you the importance of buying long-lasting quality.

      Oh, wait, you were talking about corpor

      • Re: buy cheap (Score:5, Insightful)

        by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Sunday January 17, 2021 @01:59PM (#60955668) Homepage Journal

        This is why being poor is so expensive, and you get stuck.

        So true. Through personal experience I found that when you don't have a lot of money, it's easy to get stuck in a cycle of buying shitty used cars. You keep putting money into an unreliable car that lets you down. You eventually give up and trade it in, but it's not worth anything so you have to take out a high interest loan on another shitty car. You can save a lot of money if you can ever get ahead and get out of the cycle. Rather than "You have to spend money to make money" it's more like "If you have money you can make money".

        How does one get out? I wish I had reproducible advice that anyone could use. But the honest answer is I got lucky once, and used a windfall to my advantage.

        So I suggest curbing your smugness.

        It's a well known saying. I assumed you heard it before. The laconic phrasing was for comedic effect. And the intent was to make a point that some businesses try to save money on payroll and either hire incompetent recruiters who in turn hire overpriced knowledge workers. Or they simply outsource all the engineering to the lowest bidder on the international market.

        I know better than you

        I've seen your posts over the years and I remain skeptical of such hyperbolic claims.

        • I found that when you don't have a lot of money, it's easy to get stuck in a cycle of buying shitty used cars.

          Since you can't afford to find out for yourself: I bought the expensive shitty cars so you don't have to. Put more money into an over-priced heap of shit and its still a heap of shit. You can save loads of money by not buying shit cars - assuming you can find a manufacturer of cheap and reliable cars.

          Hint: Try another planet..

  • US GNP is about $19 trillion. The author claims a $2 trillion impact.

    Yeah, I'd have to say that the author of that "study" has some bad software in their head, to come up with that amount.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Not hard to do: Bad software wastes countless hours of work, creates incidents, creates vulnerabilities, creates missed opportunities and hence can cost much, much more TCO-wise than it ever did cost to create it.

    • by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Sunday January 17, 2021 @01:06PM (#60955468) Homepage
      I believe it.

      I would easily credit that I waste ten percent of my time fighting with bad software.

      (The cost of the 737 Max bad software alone is going to be a big chunk of that.)

      • I believe it.

        I would easily credit that I waste ten percent of my time fighting with bad software.

        (The cost of the 737 Max bad software alone is going to be a big chunk of that.)

        In my case it's Office 365 and ServiceNow.

      • The 737 Max was bad design rather than poor quality software.
      • Was the bad software responsible for the decision not to train pilots, or the decision to have the second sensor as an option, or the decision to even have the software in the first place?

        • by XXongo ( 3986865 )
          The bad software paid attention to one sensor rather than looking at multiple sensors. The bad software repeatedly pushed the airlane into a dive over and over again, not noticing that the pilots kept pulling it up. The software engineers-- otherwise known a "the idiots who wrote the code" didn't even consider the possibility that the input could be bad. The software didn't bother to notice that it was driving the airplane into the ground at 400 miles per hour-- which other sensors could have told it.

          This

          • Management decided to equip the plane with one sensor, and make the second sensor optional. Management decided to have a convoluted software system to skip training cost. Management decided that skipping training was so important that the pilots shouldn't even be warned about the new system. It's easy to point at the guy implementing the code that failed, but the true failure was having that code at all.

            • by sjames ( 1099 )

              The plane has 2 angle of attack sensors as standard equipment. For some reason MCAS only looks at one of them. The light to tell pilots they disagree is supposed to be standard, but due to errors it only works when the optional feature to display the actual value is installed.

              The non-functional disagree light is a quality issue. Only checking one of the sensors is a design issue.

              • You are misinformed: having a second angle of attack sensor was an option. It doesn't matter if it was physically installed or not, if the customer doesn't pay the licenese fee for using it it effectively does not exist. That is 100% a management decision.

          • Aircraft software isn't like normal software development where you hand some software engineers some fuzzy requirements and they go off and do their best to interpret them and come up with what they think you want. By the time it hits the software engineers exact specifications for what inputs will be received, what checking they need to do, what outputs are expected and what sensors are to be read will be supplied, the software engineers will NOT be deviating from that design/architecture and will not have
            • by XXongo ( 3986865 )
              Saying that the coders shouldn't be held responsible for bad software is not the same as saying that it wasn't bad software.

              It is just saying that the bad software came from failures up the line.

    • by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Sunday January 17, 2021 @02:02PM (#60955674) Journal

      Yeah, that has to be a very broad measure. Take some of the examples they cite involving FaceBook and Google. The software in question can't be regarded as 100% poor. It cost them in PR, and perhaps even legal settlements. It had a cost to produce, but it also produced good results for the company *most of the time*. They also cite the Boeing MCAS failure which at first blush could be regarded as a software failure; but if the software fails as a result of short-sighted management and regulatory capture, I don't think it's fair to describe it as strictly a software failure. Their engineers were *pressured* to produce substandard work that cost lives.

      I don't know what their methodology is to classify a project as "poor" or not, and if they classify it as "poor" they might be counting the entire expenditure on the project in their total which to reiterate, is not fair if the project also produced revenue.

      • but if the software fails as a result of short-sighted management and regulatory capture, I don't think it's fair to describe it as strictly a software failure. Their engineers were *pressured* to produce substandard work that cost lives.

        Its like saying the designers of the shuttles heat shields were bad, when they designed perfectly good heat shields that were used for years without incident, and only when other concerns got involved, that the good design was sacrificed for the sake of something other than better design (in this case, environmentalist got to decide which heat shield was "better" and so astronauts lost their fucking lives)

        • by sjames ( 1099 )

          I don't think environmentalists had anything to do with it. What's your evidence?

          • Its fucking well known why the second shuttle went down, asshole. For fuck sakes you dont ask what my evidence for water being wet is. You also dont ask what my evidence for JFK being shot is.

            When YOU dont know common knowledge, but YOU are fucking acting like you know shit, and YOU ask for verification on common fucking knowledge, YOU are the impediment to ALL THINGS. You are the impediment to you getting the answer you seek. YOU are the problem. IN ALL THINGS
            • by sjames ( 1099 )

              I know the carbon carbon panels on the leading edge failed causing hot gas to enter the wings, I just don't know where the environmentalists supposedly come in to it? Based on your attack response, I'm guessing you don't either.

      • > They also cite the Boeing MCAS failure which at first blush could be regarded as a software failure; but if the software fails as a result of short-sighted management and regulatory capture, I don't think it's fair to describe it as strictly a software failure. Their engineers were *pressured* to produce substandard work

        Poor quality software in business is ALWAYS a failure of management. Every time.

        It's management that sets budget and deadlines, in most cases. It's management that sets the tone or cult

  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday January 17, 2021 @01:02PM (#60955436)

    The stupidity of hiring cheap, bad people to create things that have exceptionally low replication cost (unlike most other engineering) but also high cost when they do not work right, is staggering and cannot really be overstated. We need to get rid of 80% of all coders or so and only let good ones do the work. Because the rest has negative productivity, because they create so many problems that need cleaning up that it would have been much cheaper not hiring them in the first place.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      That would be great... But how do you find new developers then? Most coders out of the university produce crap.

      Largest problem are the managers that think they can just double the amount of developers and double production.. I'd say you should only hire 1 new developer every 6 months per every 10 developers you have... Maybe 2-3 new developers if you are hiring senior developers because even they will have a learning stage of the new code-base..
       

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Largest problem are the managers that think they can just double the amount of developers and double production..

        Indeed. That stupidity has to stop. No number of bad coders can do what a single good coder can do. They will just not produce good code and software, no matter what.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      Also, being cheap with QA people too and relying too much on public users.

    • Yes, hiring cheap, bad people cost more over the long term, BUT on the short term, it saves money!

      How short is "short term"? How about the next quarter? That is how far most American business look, especially those listed on the stock market.

      Typical software runs a business easily takes years to fully develop, and then the cost of ownership won't be apparent until a few more years after that. By then, the manager responsible for hiring would be either fired if the launch failed or it costed too much, or

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Yes, hiring cheap, bad people cost more over the long term, BUT on the short term, it saves money!

        How short is "short term"? How about the next quarter? That is how far most American business look, especially those listed on the stock market.

        Typical software runs a business easily takes years to fully develop, and then the cost of ownership won't be apparent until a few more years after that. By then, the manager responsible for hiring would be either fired if the launch failed or it costed too much, or promoted elsewhere if launch went well.

        How often do you see the same person responsible for the development also stayed around and be responsible for running the software 10 years down the road? *Those* places will hire expensive, competent developers.

        Sure, not doing any needed investment saves money in the short term. In the long term it kills the company. That is if the competition is not as pathetic.
        I expect some time there will be a big shake-up and after that only qualified people will even be allowed to write software. You know, like things are done in any other engineering discipline. I expect the shake-up will come from liability.

  • h1b? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Sunday January 17, 2021 @01:08PM (#60955478)

    How much of this inferior software was offshored, or done by mass h1B holders?

    • Re:h1b? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17, 2021 @02:24PM (#60955752)

      How much of this inferior software was offshored, or done by mass h1B holders?

      Probably a lot of it, I'd wager. This isn't just a problem in IT. Look at medical education, for example. Americans apply to college and finance it with government-backed student loans. There is then a mad scramble to try to get accepted into medical school, many who (at least about two decades ago) cared more that someone did Habitat for Humanity volunteer work in Honduras or had an interesting story about hiking a mountain than they did anything that was actually relevant. The people accepted to US medical schools finance it with government-backed student loans.

      But then it gets more ridiculous. In order to do anything with that new MD degree, the newly graduated doctor has to go to residency. So there's now another mad scramble to get accepted to residency. But the government subsidies for residents to the universities behind it all is per resident, not whether that resident is a US citizen or not. The universities know this, so they apply for mass H1B-permit status. They reject a lot of perfectly qualified US candidates and instead bring in foreign graduates on H1B visas because those people will work cheaper. (Dismissing the fact that they're forcing people to get the additional training -- which is a good thing.)

      The catch is that a resident is capped supposedly at 80 hours/week with 36 hour shifts every couple of days. A decade ago the average resident salary was something like $50,000. So $50,000/(52*80) = $12.01/hr. not counting all the additional study time that one has to do outside of that. Plus, people wind up making mad scrambles all over the country because their local program wouldn't accept them and brought in a bunch of H1Bs instead, and have to relocate. This incurs a social and economic cost of the actual move, disruption of spouse's careers, etc.

      Then after the residency there's ongoing costs which are nearly unthinkable otherwise. Think a board certification test which costs $2500 and is given only three days out of the year, in October, but requires that you pay for it by early February, and $4000 of "review" material that even new graduates have to buy and slug through because the material on the test bares no resemblence to society. (And a lot of the "right" answers will get you sued and/or kill people and/or get your license pulled.) Then because of ongoing "maintenance of certification" requirements means that you wind up having to continue to spend a lot of money on review materials even on years when you aren't taking the test, plus wasting loads of time on crap like doing internal practice studies of handwashing practices. Then anywhere from every 5-10 years these people have to go recertify (just like with a lot of IT) where the boards milk another $2000 or so out of each person.

      IT is notorious for doing similar things. In a city that is mostly white, black, and hispanic there is one of the largest corporations in the country which has a huge complex on one side of town. Naturally, apartments went up all around the place. The astute observer, though, will note that before they open at 8:00am the street is covered with literally hundreds of people obviously of Indian descent crossing to get to work. (That's understandable, and I have nothing against Indians. But it seems very improbable that the demographics of this country, and much of Silicon Valley, bears no resemblence to the demographics of the country at large). So it isn't a stretch that H1B visas are being abused there as well.

      The result of all this is wage suppression in industries that are affected by this, both because of abuse of things like H1B visas and because of government meddling. Meanwhile, corporations of course don't charge less, but charge what the market will give (which is how capitalism works) of course. So any "savings" gets pumped into the back pockets of executives at the detriment to the employees, and the way employees are hired is at the detriment to U.S

    • by jools33 ( 252092 )

      Grouping all H1B and labeling as developers of inferior software seems to me like you have some issues with diversity in the workplace. I now work for a multinational and I am a development quality manager for our software delivery, some of our best developers are offshore and work from India. In my experience (26 years) I would say the quality issues are more often with the local developers, although I am extremely wary of stereotyping.

  • How do I, as a buyer of goods, know the quality of what I'm buying if it's not physically apparent? If I buy a drug, or an airplane, or an electrical appliance, there's some assurance from the regulatory or testing lab that it's safe (FDA, FAA, UL).

    Now, what is the cost of all that overhead in time and money? Should software development be slowed down and cost more?

    • Should software development be slowed down and cost more?

      Hell, Yes! A thousand times, Hell Yes.

      The biggest reason for software quality issues where I work is unreasonable time constraints. The bosses ALWAYS want the software done yesterday. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the cost of poor software is $2.1 trillion, then I would assign just about all of that as the consequence of unreasonable time constraints. I would assign the remaining residue to bad developers.

      • by teg ( 97890 )

        Should software development be slowed down and cost more?

        Hell, Yes! A thousand times, Hell Yes.

        The biggest reason for software quality issues where I work is unreasonable time constraints. The bosses ALWAYS want the software done yesterday. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the cost of poor software is $2.1 trillion, then I would assign just about all of that as the consequence of unreasonable time constraints. I would assign the remaining residue to bad developers.

        I disagree. In my experience, one main cause of failure is having the wrong scope at the beginning. This can end up showing up as having too little time, but if you do a root cause analysis you see a lot of work done for little benefit, alongside trying to fight for resources of things that are needed, but not explicitly in the original scope.

        "Never ready to release because the scope is unclear and keeps changing." is another variation of the same - when time is allowed to vary rather than serve as a co

        • In my experience, one main cause of failure is having the wrong scope at the beginning.

          I can see your point, and it does make sense. However, if scope changes come with the time necessary to adjust for them, then they won't change the resulting quality of the software.

    • > assurance from the regulatory or testing lab

      lol

      . . .

      Also: Open source. And like with foods and corporations, the rule goes: Slowly, organically grown, gives the highest quality. E.g. highest micronutrient to sugar water ratio.

    • If you're buying mass-market off the shelf software it's a lot like buying anything else. You can talk to people who have used that product as well as other alternatives, for example.

      If it's bespoke software, being developed for you, or if you are a significant customer of the company selling the software there are a few things you can do.

      You can ensure that the requirements are well documented.
      Software development for quality assurance is largely a process of repeatedly translating the requirements from En

  • Before computers, humans did the tasks manually. If the organizational "system" was screwed up, then the organization produced bad or slow results.

  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday January 17, 2021 @01:24PM (#60955534)

    Companies are generally managed by a bunch of MBAs that don't care about software quality. Their job is clear: make money faster. Ensuring software is of higher quality requires both time and resources. To them, the fact that the customer is getting screwed is not a concern because they have already paid for the product. Meanwhile, the MBAs that are buying software want cheaper software and aren't even capable of evaluating code quality but instead view things in terms of contracts. From a contractual perspective, they are doing the right thing when they buy cheap software with low quality code. Until this changes, they will continue paying for low quality software.

    The bottom line is there are no mechanisms in businesses that promote the creation or use of quality software.

    • Yes, part of their job is evaluate decisions in terms of costs and benefits. So they are when you show them that crappy software has a $2 trillion cost.

      If you want management to invest $100K more in a software project, that only makes sene if you show that the extra benefit is well significantly more than $100K. If you show the hours spent dealing with problems from the software are equivalent to two full time employees, that's a cost of $300K or whatever. If better software will mean they spend half as mu

      • Yes, part of their job is evaluate decisions in terms of costs and benefits. So they are when you show them that crappy software has a $2 trillion cost.

        The problem here is that your argument depends on well informed MBAs. The truth is that they are not well informed about software. Seriously, you will be hard-pressed to find an MBA that can see beyond the initial price tag much less evaluate the value of the software itself.

        • I see I failed to make my post clear. I apologise for wasting your time reading something that I didn't write clearly. Let me try to do better at making my point understandable.

          > The problem here is that your argument depends on well informed MBAs.

          What I'm telling you is that if you want the MBAs to decide a certain way, you need to inform them of why they should do so.
          If people aren't informed about costs and benefits of your proposal, guess who could have done a better job of their proposal.

          If your pr

          • I might have been unclear because I was long-winded.
            Let me try short and to the point:

            > The problem here is that your argument depends on well informed MBAs.

            So are you going to inform them, or are you going to whine?

            (Informing them means information with dollar signs in it, information about costs an benefits measured in dollars.)

            • So are you going to inform them, or are you going to whine?

              Not my job.

              • Obviously I don't know who does what job in your organization.
                I do know that if nobody informs management about the benefits of your project, management will not be informed about the benefits of your project.

          • you need to inform them...

            And collect their salary.

            • Indeed somebody who knows both high-quality software development AND business management is strictly harder to find than someone who only knows business management.

              Somebody who knows both, is a good communicator, and is diplomatic enough to facilitate between the two groups has a quite rate set of skills indeed. Skills that can demand quite a salary. Ps I didn't learn that from a book.

          • "People normally get an MBA after they've reached something of a peak in their first career path."

            Only some...those are the "executive MBA" programs you see state universities offering. The vast majority of MBAs are straight out of school. The paths are usually:

            1. Elite college --> Elite MBA --> McKinsey/BAH/Bain/BCG --> Executive suite at a customer
            2. Elite or semi-elite college --> Accenture/IBM/PwC/EY --> MBA --> Management at a customer
            3. Elite college --> Elite MBA --> Managemen

  • Who's stupid enough to believe that one can reasonably calculate sometbing like this, and that this is even within two orders of magnitude of correct?

  • Does that include forced Windows 10 updates that destroy work in progress?
    • by xwin ( 848234 )
      It looks like you have an incompetent IT department. For all of the causes of work lost in progress, windows updates has never been the cause. Even if you at total moron, 10 minutes of searching will tell you how to turn windows update off. If you machine is managed, you need to fire all of the IT people and hire a competent ones, who can deploy updates correctly. Where I work, machine will give you up to 10 days to reboot, after installing updates. And if you have something that requires long run times, yo
      • At home, I am my own IT department. After it happened the first time, yes, I Googled for 10 minutes and solved the problem (and it was not an intuitive solution). But I lost work the first time. Multiply that by a few hundred million other such home users.

        I also expect many home users, though, are not as "competent" (to use your word) as that.

        • If you hadn't purchased a new PC you wouldn't have to use Win10.

          That's why I regularly recommend to my uni to purchase refurbished 4th-gen business pcs (Lenovo and Dell) which are hardwarewise ultra reliable, so that I can install Windows 7 on them plus a good antivirus (ESET is my #1 choice). If for some reason staff insists on Win10, I install the LTSC edition, for which we have KMS licensing. LTSC is the best of the two worlds, after two years the people haven't yet complained about any problem.

    • It's not only the updates that are are wrong with Win10. It's full of annoyances and mysterious bugs. Everybody knows that MS has fired all their QA team and uses the so-called insiders as beta testers. How can a software title (and even more so, an OS) have acceptable quality when there is no adequate testing? It's no wonder that the British navy still runs on Windows XP, as probably is most of the world's nuclear arsenal.

  • From the article:

    It just takes one major outage or security breach to eliminate the value gained by speed to market. Disciplined software engineering matters when the potential losses are at this scale.

    It would be good to provide some reasoning behind this claim. How did they evaluate the losses from being late to the market?

  • After slinging code for over 20 years it's very clear that most quality issues live at the management level. Sure a senior developer can write code faster than a junior and a local developer faster than offshore. One can plan for varying staffing skill levels without much difficulty. However that is not an excuse for cutting security, compliance, and scalability features. Many companies encourage cuts that are at minimum negligent if not actually criminal.
  • A big part of this is due to a huge influx of cheap labor from overseas. In order to get that cheap labor within the constraints of the H1-B system we have to pretend that every code monkey in India is a senior engineer with a Master's degree (otherwise they'd have to admit they're guys who did an 8 month stint at a vocational school and that any American and and would do that).

    Thing is, I know guys who did those 8 months vocational school stints in the 90s and were making $60-$80k back then. That's 6 f
  • What they don't mention is the cost or rather missed profits of having no such software in the first place. Yes you might have business running on 20 years old MS Access database and it might be expensive to maintain or replace it, but you cannot deny the value said software generated during these years.

    This is applicable to all parts of the technical depth the IT world has to carry. It generates more value than its amortized cost. Otherwise it gets replaces, always.

    • My bike(or feet) will eventually get me to where I want to go for business. But if my time is valuable (and that of those waiting) at even $10 per hour, a car is quickly justified if the distances and times are to add up.

      You could not only argue that my feet provided transport value as I walked from Boston to NYC but that I also saved $40 in gasoline.

      I have witnessed so many systems that could have been so much more but bad software development systems and cultures had pushed out a system that was at t
  • Can they show it would cost less to make the quality software? I mean, humans are only so good at something. What would it cost to align civilization (attitudes, education) to the "produce quality software" model?

  • unsuccessful IT projects alone cost U.S. companies $260 billion in 2020

    Management's ultimately responsible for getting these projects out the door. IT Managers need both technical and organizational skills. As technology rapidly changes, even those in management who had those skills to begin with often don't keep up. Managers should either be immediately able to do the work of those who report them, or have enough background to learn the necessary skills.

    software problems in legacy systems cost businesses $

  • Seriously - that's $2.1T/month, right?

    I got my professional start almost 42 years ago at the age of 17. My grandmother is 103 and quite lucid...I'd like to work until I reach her age, just to see how much more things can change.

    Perhaps the biggest dilemma I see when writing software is having to put my name on code which was largely written by someone who practically based their understanding of coding to be trial & error...and that's a fair share of people in the industry. At one job, "Brent" (if y
  • CMU SEI under another name and trolling for cash. Their "solutions" to anything are institutes in fortress-like buildings, anointed auditors from the same realms that audited Too Big To Fail, and Unit Development Folders. Also a cut of the $2.1T and sinecures for spreadsheet-fillers and auditors with security clearances. A few commercial realms have comparable concerns with long service lifetimes and configuration control at large scale, but none have the peculiar program/proposal/bid government contract
  • I use CAD tools which are very high cost.

    The level of stupid, irritating bugs is quite high.

    The UI's are fairly unintuitive, with a high degree of non-obvious things going on. Menus hiding features, multiple tabs in dialogs, checkboxes on multiple tabs that have a significant effect on how calculations are performed, etc...

    Here's an example of the UI strategy: we have a bunch of menus, and we don't want to add more. so we'll make sub-menus and add stuff into them. then we'll add sub-menus to those sub-men

    • Most tools that involve manipulation of the "real world" risk my punching fist through my monitor. I was watching a video of a guy do something cool on photoshop. I think it took him around an hour and he kept the crashes in his video of which there were at least 3. I'm not sure half of the comments were about his art so much as about how often photoshop crashes on everyone.

      In my various 3D software tools the number of stupid and problematic bugs is astounding. Do something as simple as merge two spheres
  • 2.1tril spread over 4.6mil IT workers comes out to about $500k in lost or destroyed value per person on average. Not all "IT" people are programmers or responsible for software quality, so this number is probably much larger. Brings a whole new notion to negative value.
  • ... I only write high-quality software. :-)

  • How much time and money is wasted because the systems we're forced to use every day are poorly implemented? Think about it: You wait ten minutes every morning for your Windows machine to stabilize after it's booted before it will pay attention to what YOU want to do. So, you either suck it up OR you leave your computer on all night thus wasting energy. Trying to deal with everything online is just as bad. Waiting waiting waiting....

  • Three things happened in the 1990's that got us where we are today.

    The injection of "professional" managers into IT management. Prior to the 1990's it took two things to become an IT manager. A proven track record of technical performance and demonstrate able leadership skills. Now IT management is clogged with "professional" managers who have no technical or leadership skills and just got the job as a political reward.

    Offshoring, where there is never enough money to it right bu always enough to do
    • Three comments where I have to violently agree with you:

      Professional managers. I have taken the PMP course and while it does have a few things that make sense it is filled with busy work. I would never do a project without at least having a whiteboard session with the other developers (no matter how much I manage ever, I will always develop) to make a sticky note Work Breakdown Structure. Then will take that and make the simplest of timelines so that we can see if this is a week, or a year or whatever. Ce
  • Due to the nature of my previous job I was hired to do something specific for quite a few companies and/or worked with companies.

    I did this for about 20 years and maybe saw 200 companies in that time. Of course over that time the various tools changed for all the fundamentals and things came and went. Workstations as servers evolved into rack-mounted servers, then VMs, and the cloud; that sort of thing.

    Out of those 200 companies, I could maybe pick 5 that were genuinely good at making software (and some
  • Not in America. That is the real issue.
    • Have a look at the algorithm programming competitions (written in English). The best developers are in Europe or China...
  • Fortunately (Score:4, Funny)

    by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Monday January 18, 2021 @12:06AM (#60957928)
    The $2.1 Trillion figure was calculated by a poor quality software. The actual figure must be less.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • 1) Too many programmers these days simply lack the skills necessary to build quality software.
    2) Too many programmers lack pride in their work. If it compiles (or runs, or works for a very limited test suite), then its time to rush off to the next task.
    3) Too many programmers are not given the resources, time, and support of their management to make quality a priority.

    are just three quick reasons. There are many more.

    I am building a new kind of data management system. It is my own project, so I get to

We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan

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