2001/12/30

The People wanted a Made With CityDesk banner. Who am I to argue with The People?

Doc says, "When the software industry is mature, it will look a lot like the construction industry." This is a common theme. A lot of people complain about how the creation of software suffers from all kinds of problems that mature professions (construction, civil engineering, etc) don't. The key problem is always that the software coding process doesn't seem to be reproducible and predictable. Programmers think things will take 10 weeks and then they take 20 weeks, and they have weird bugs that you would never tolerate from a bridge built by a civic engineer.

Implicit in the claim that the software industry is "immature" is the belief that this is just because we haven't learned all the tricks yet to getting reproducible results. But this idea rests on a falsehood. The unique thing about software is that it is infinitely clonable. Once you've written a subroutine, you can call it as often as you want. This means that almost everything we do as software developers is something that has never been done before. This is very different than what construction workers do. Herman the Handyman, who just installed a tile floor for me, has probably installed hundreds of tile floors. He has to keep installing tile floors again and again as long as new tile floors are needed. We in the software industry would have long since written a Tile Floor Template Library (TFTL) and generating new tile floors would be trivial. (OK, maybe there would be six versions of the library, one for Delphi, one for perl, etc. And some sick puppy programmers like me would rewrite it. But only once, and I would use it everywhere I needed a tile floor, and I would try to convince my clients that their back lawn would look really nice with tile instead of grass.)

In software, the boring problems are solved. Everything you do is on the cutting edge by definition. So by definition it is unpredictable. That's why software has more of a science nature than a construction nature.

Oh, and by the way: My company, Fog Creek Software, has paid internships in software development for qualified college students. They're in New York City. Free housing, lunch, and more. And you get to work on real, shipping software with the smartest developers in the business.

About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

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