by keeda | 2025-11-25 20:16:14+00:00
I think there is a ton more nuance, but can still be explained by a simple observation, which TFA hints at: "It's the economics, stupid."

Engineering is the intersection of applied sciences, economics and business. The economics aspect is almost never recognized and explains many things. Projects of other disciplines have significantly higher costs and risks, which is why they require a lot more rigor. Taking hardware as example, one bad design decision can sink the entire company.

On the other hand, software has economics that span a much more diverse range than any other field. Consider:

- The capital costs are extremely low.

- Development can be extremely fast at the task level.

- Software, once produced, can be scaled almost limitlessly for very cheap almost instantly.

- The technology moves extremely fast. Most other engineering disciplines have not fundamentally changed in decades.

- The technology is infinitely flexible. Software for one thing can very easily be extended for an adjacent business need.

- The risks are often very low, but can be very high at the upper end. The rigor applied scales accordingly. Your LoB CRUD app going down might bother a handful of people, so who cares about tests? But your flight control software better be (and is) tested to hell and back.

- Projects vary drastically in stacks, scopes and risk profiles, but the talent pool is more or less common. This makes engineering culture absolutely critical because hiring is such a crapshoot.

- Extreme flexibility also masks the fact that complexity compounds very quickly. Abstractions enable elegant higher-level designs, but they mask internal details that almost always leak and introduce minor issues that cause compounding complexity.

- The business rules that software automates are extremely messy to begin with (80K payroll rules!) However, the combination of a) flexibility, b) speed, and c) scalability engender a false sense of confidence. Often no attempt is made at all to simplify business requirements, which is probably where the biggest wins hide. This is also what enables requirements to shift all the time, a prime cause for failures.

Worse, technical and business complexity can compound. E.g. its very easy to think "80K payroll rules linearly means O(80K) software modules" and not "wait, maybe those 80K payroll rules interact with each other, so it's probably a super-linear growth in complexity." Your architecture is then oriented towards the simplistic view, and needs hacks when business reality inevitably hits, which then start compounding complexity in the codebase.

And of course, if that's a contract up for bidding, your bid is going to be unsustainably low, which will be further depressed by the competitive bidding process.

If the true costs of a project -- which include human costs to the end users -- are not correctly evaluated, the design and rigor applied will be correspondingly out of whack.

As such I think most failures, in addition to regular old human issues like corruption, can be attributed to an insufficient appreciation of the economics involved, driven primarily by overindexing on the powers of software without an appreciation of the pitfalls.