Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)

https://www.simplethread.com/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-build-software/

by fagnerbrack • 5 years ago

221 172 5 years ago

Some interesting thoughts in here. I guess the main thing is that there is basically infinite demand for more things in software. You can take almost any feature from any product and come up with new things you would like it to do that would take entire teams of developers to work on.

Software will never get quicker to develop because we will always request the absolute maximum amount of features that the market can stand to afford.

Basically every area has exploded with more features and is still way way behind what people would ideally want. Just look at the difference between Discord and IRC.

NalNezumi• 5 years ago

I mean.... isn't this true for hardware too?

Razors today looks very different from the ones when it was invented. Same goes for vacuum cleaners, cars, tools for construction/manual task, the list goes on.

The only notable difference is that each iteration of hardware have a vividly clear version start/end date compared to the rolling versioning of software. First vacuum cleaner was invented 1908...

canofbars• 5 years ago

Everything is improving I guess but there is very little relative investment in razors. They look different but arguably function worse than the original style double edge.

Vacuum cleaners have had a bit of innovation but no one is really desperate for a better vacuum cleaner unlike software. Also many of these hardware items have basically reached close to their peak form. You can't really make a radically better bicycle because we have already reached almost the best design.

With a team and a few years you can usually obliterate the leading software product in most areas and with a large team you could completely revolutionize it since there is so much easy target improvements to be had.

js82• 5 years ago

But do we actually have more features? I don't think Google Docs has more features than Ami Pro.

I think the problem is the modern focus on adding features, without consideration whether and how these compose. Not all features are equal - some can be used as a foundation on which more can be easily built, while some are a detriment to that. Just adding features without architectural consideration leads to - surprisingly - bad architecture.

MattGaiser• 5 years ago

Just adding features without architectural consideration leads to - surprisingly - bad architecture.

But you don't sell architecture. You sell features.

And people write their own Google Docs features. I have spent a bunch of time coding up things for that.

RandallBrown• 5 years ago

Did Ami Pro let dozens of users around the world edit the same document at the same time? Some of them being on cell phones?

Did it automatically store your document somewhere that can be accessed from any computer with internet access?

Seems to me like we really do have more features.

loteck• 5 years ago

I guess the main thing is that there is basically infinite demand for more things in software.

Law is very similar to software in this way. They both also take a long time to write & are never actually "finished."

pm904• 5 years ago

This is an interesting analogy. However, I would argue that Law is less constrained by the laws of nature.

If a program is broken, even the best programmer in the world may not be able to fix it if they can't diagnose the underlying problem. Whereas in law; there is no such problem. If a law is found to be bad, you change it. Most reasonably competent lawyers could come up with a solution. Not to say that creativity and intelligence isn't required, the constraints are just different. (You do hit the laws of nature at some point, but I believe there are guardrails in law that prevent this from happening; e.g. no judge will sentence a person to run a million miles even if some combination of inane laws may require that as punishment).

Animats• 5 years ago

Try building hardware. That's harder.

branko_d• 5 years ago

They ain’t calling it HARDware for nothing! :)

01000010x• 5 years ago

Also, user needs are evolving constantly (or are identified in an iterative cycle) and code is structurally not very good at changing constantly.

cosmotic• 5 years ago

More so than user needs are user expectations, which are often just following trends set by larger software companies with much larger budgets. And just like other trends, they rapidly change and are fleeting.

js82• 5 years ago

I think Paras Parmar's comment on that page is spot on.

holografix• 5 years ago

The pace of change is too quick and the permutations of how to do X are necessarily too numerous.

As far as I know there is no “standards body” that governs these things across organisations.

Ie: if you’re developing a web app that needs to poll other systems for data every X minutes there should be a standard that governs the best way of doing this in the major 5 languages.

Taking into account SRE principles like logging, scaling, security etc. And some clear code examples using the simplest and least OO-functional-prototypical-new age code possible

username903• 5 years ago

What is the value of the current pace of change though? We are using billions of developer hours every year to keep up with all the changes, where is it going, why do we need to spend so much time changing things? Changing things doesn't just force people to rewrite, even worse it forces people to relearn instead of achieving mastery.

How many percent of developers understand how everything in their stack works to such a degree that they'd be surprised if there are any problems when they test things? Basically nobody, yet it isn't really an unachievable goal. Why can't a web developer reach that point after 5 years of full time? Simple, it is all the damn changes to everything that happens constantly. It is so bad that most seems to think it is impossible to master anything in software engineering, yet if you just pin down the versions of all your dependencies and work like that for a few years everything will be crystal clear, that is how the human brain works.

jbverschoor2• 5 years ago

Fun fact.. it doesn’t!

Some of the most widely used software has been created in a few weeks or days.

joubert• 5 years ago

Have they released subsequent versions?

laurent92• 5 years ago

Git: 2 weeks by Linus Torvarlds,

Javascript: 10 days (Brendan Eich?? not sure)

Both have had iterations. Git, because the original command line was awful. JS had to be reimplemented with its weirdities, because websites were already relying on them (and this is why we get the WAT demo: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat )

I’d day, in 10 days, what you build is an excellent architecture for a project used across the world for half a century. But just the architecture. The features come later. Perhaps it’s limited to 10 days because that is the span of medium-term memory and it matches the maximum number of concepts in the human mind?

tcbasche• 5 years ago

Created, yes. But maintained, built upon, iterated over and improved?

jbverschoor2• 5 years ago

The same can be said about homes, buildings, road. They can take hundreds of years to maintain, build upon, iterate over and improve.

The problem is almost never technical, or "software". Any decent programmer is able to create 90% of the demand.

Domain knowledge, requirements, product management, roadmaps, business tradeoffs is where all the time goes

karmasimida• 5 years ago

Does it? I mean it takes years to shoot a film or write a book, as creative activities, I don't see the evidence that software is more difficult or time consuming in that regard.

mstipetic5• 5 years ago

It's because most software developers add negative value. Most not them aren't investing in learning at all and are just playing around and understanding things on the surface level. I'm fairly certain it takes much more learning and effort to keep up to date as an accountant than a software engineer.

I've been getting into elixir and was very sad to realise that a lot of the best practices have been enshrined into the erlang otp library for 20 years and we've forgotten about it.

Think how many engineers you know that can reason well about db indexes or could implement something like redis given enough time.

On the one hand it's fairly depressing, on the other hand it makes sense from the incentive structure - business people treat them like "nerds" they're not on the same career path as someone in management, PMs come from weird professions that have nothing to do with software and are focussing on weird scrum processes and jira tickets...

At least that has been my experience. I've seen massive amounts of wasted resources that has made me a bit jaded

ardit33• 5 years ago

"it takes much more learning and effort to keep up to date as an accountant than a software engineer"

you are wrong in many levels.... accounting is a field that moves slowly and it is highly regulated

Software is still in the wild wild west phase, and it catches and loses trends all the time. We are currently using languages and platforms that didn't exist at all 10-12 years ago, yet, in 10 years whatever you are doing now, might be completely obsolete and you have to retrain-retool.

mstipetic5• 5 years ago

Why is that? It's because we don't learn from the past and keep thinking we're the smartest and have to reinvent everything with every new generation of developers.

I've worked at a company where elasticseatch, postgres, message queues, custom microservice platforms, custom cicd platforms were deployed for a load that could fit in ram of one machine. With maybe 10 customers per minute.

And you're wrong about accounting, new laws and regulations are being passed constantly and one has to keep up with them all the time

kaba03• 5 years ago

But experience with one language tranfers quite well to a new one. I also see a deep problem from the business side, that a programmer is easily replaceable ot that just by throwing more (mediocre) people at the problem will help solve it faster, or even the existence of rock-star developers.

Building software is slow, because essential complexity. We are writing programs that no one person can hold in their heads. And based on the average CRUD app, it might not be trivial (even though they are already increasingly complex), but more complex applications really can take multiple years/decades to create. And it is a bit sad that there is little focus on reuse, even though that is the only silver-bullet out there. No language, no tool; but (high-quality) libraries.

TheCoelacanth• 5 years ago

Accounting is highly regulated, but the regulations change basically every year and the penalties for not following them can be very severe.

gonzo41• 5 years ago

You may be jaded, but it doesn't mean you're wrong. Framework churn is such an issue, and so it language and all the other fashions that we are victim too. People don't spend enough time getting value from what they decide to use.

I think a more relaxing way to think about software, is to think about bridges and buildings. Sometimes bridges and buildings fall down. It happens less now. However, Civil engineers have had about ~2500 years to try all the combos and now they can both make things both robust and pretty.

If software is bridges, we as an industry spend a lot of effort on the gold plating very rickety construction. Gold plating in the form of over security engineering inconsequential little things, over complicating UI's, rapidly building new languages because of a perceptual deficiency in language Y.

It'll stabilize, and success will go up. The business / PM side is also new at this and doesn't control risk well yet. Agile and Scrum attempt it but .... the same fundamentals that get a building built well and on budget also apply to good software.

f430• 5 years ago

because software is mostly about learning and working code is merely a side effect of the latter.

boris• 5 years ago

One aspect that is not mentioned is that we build software on top of an ever-increasing number of first-to-market, low-quality, building blocks. And by low-quality I mean "worse is better"/MVP/"everyone makes mistakes"/"leaky abstractions"/etc -- pick your favorite. As a result, we spend more and more time dealing with someone else's mistakes rather than making forward progress.

lisper3• 5 years ago

I dunno, there's a lot of really high quality stable software out there. It's not all crap.

But as someone who has had the luxury of taking time to do things the Right Way let me tell you from firsthand experience: doing things the Right Way is incredibly hard in no small measure because figuring out what you actually want to do is incredibly hard. There have been many times when I thought I was building something for the ages only to discover that I had made a bad assumption, or technology changed, or the market changed, or my own desires changed. The process of meeting human needs is messy because both human needs and the tools we have at our disposal are a constantly moving target.

_ph_• 5 years ago

You are right, not all is crap. But too many people are not aware how much is crap and are pretty naive about using libraries. I don't think it is an accident, that e.g. the Java universe has uncountable numbers of libraries and Java projects have unbelievable many dependencies and e.g. Lisp has a percived lack of libraries. There are many reasons for that, but also, that Lisp programmers tend to rely on libraries less.

xupybd• 5 years ago

Wow, after your comment about having the luxury of taking time I wanted to find out how. I found your website in your bio. Very impressive and very cool to see even huge successes find the time to comment on HN.

dgb23• 5 years ago

The process of meeting human needs is messy because both human needs and the tools we have at our disposal are a constantly moving target.

Software development is inherently explorative. Finding the right solutions is exactly that: finding, discovery, learning and play. IMO This is best enabled by fast feedback loops and highly dynamic, interactive systems and visualization.

Sometimes it is possible/feasible to parametrize a tool beyond what it is supposed to be doing to enable this kind of play and discovery, but also to make the process of building data, plumbing and so on just a bit more efficient and fun.

Game programmers get that: At some point while developing a game, they create the tools that produce the data, or the parameters, typically controlled with a visual interface, a configuration language or a scripting language. Level editors, state machines, behavior trees, story boards, flow scripting etc.

Another field that does this well is scientific computing, they use Jupiter Notebooks etc. with integrated REPLs and graph visualization.

The whole "no-code" and "low-code" trend[0] also shows that people are willing to program with constrained, visual languages. It empowers them and connects their mental model more directly to a product (instead of having to go all the way through a team of implementers for every change that could be exposed as data).

[0] I personnally don't like the terms "no-code" and "low-code" at all, because they describe what it is not, instead of what it is: visual programming. It's like "no-sql": Could be anything from a configuration file, to a document db, to a key-value store or a ACID graph db.

dxdm• 5 years ago

This has not been my experience in backend development (and some dabbling in building small React frontends). Our building blocks are FOSS components who are quite robust and widely tested, and the bugs, mistakes and shortcuts we have to deal with are almost exclusively of our own making.

ashkankiani• 5 years ago

"There are popular bad libraries out there that people base their software on." "I use good libraries"

Not really relevant.

fxtentacle4• 5 years ago

Fully agree.

At first I was inclined to comment "it doesn't" because I can easily build small but useful tools in a matter of days.

But your comment made me realize that maybe the reason is just that I keep using the same old C++ libraries to avoid surprises.

In my last Ruby project, critical APIs changed multiple times during development. But Boost / openssl / curl / TBB / MKL are surprisingly API stable, given how much is changed under the hood.

Maybe conservative languages attract conservative programmers who conserve time by conserving APIs.

forgotmypw175• 5 years ago

I'm a high-level guy, and I avoid using anything under 20 years in existence.

All the easy problems are already solved and well-documented, and less likely to break my code with a new release.

I then try to write code in such a way that it would have worked 15 years ago and today both, working around platform changes.

My current stack is Perl, HTML, CSS, SSI, PHP, SQLite, PGP, txt, and JavaScript.

And yes, my sites do work in Netscape 2.0+, IE 3.0+, Lynx, Links, w3m, and with a few settings tweaks, also Mosaic.

systemvoltage2• 5 years ago

Totally agree.

Move fast and break things? Let’s not. Let’s build carefully and methodically. Teach others how to build quality software. Stop regurgitating what you watch on YouTube 4 hour course. I’ve seen horrific, I mean absolutely bottom of the barrel code being taught to others. Especially in JS community - yes, I’m picking at you guys again.

When teaching goes to shit, you’re breeding and propagating, institutionalizing horrible ways to do something - amplified 100x because YouTubers are chasing viewership. That code camp 8 hour course is better replaced by reading good books and docs. Actually build something by thoroughly reading the docs.

Now you got 100x more developers building foundational blocks that other developers blindly build atop.

Study what Unix did when they were building small composable highly quality building blocks. Still used today after 45 years!

BlargMcLarg• 5 years ago

Move fast and break things itself doesn't imply you shouldn't go back to patch it up and make it cleaner. People should be moving fast so they don't end up in endless discussions regarding or spend too much time on creating a foundation for a solution that doesn't work, and to inhibit perfectionism. People should also be transitioning from "make it work" to "make it good" once it works, prior to delivering or finalizing it.

This is largely a problem with people unable to shift practice according to the context, lazy developers and managers thinking "it works" means "ship it and never look back". Unfortunately, there is no cure perfect cure for lack of foresight and willingness to listen to the guy saying PoC code will cause problems at some point down the line.

reificator• 5 years ago

Study what Unix did when they were building small composable highly quality building blocks. Still used today after 45 years!

Don't worry, systemd has integrated building blocks that can replace all that. Those pesky reusable, composable modules won't hit their 50th birthday.

cookiengineer• 5 years ago

Especially in JS community - yes, I’m picking at you guys again.

Don't worry, we're not offended because we know it's true.

I bet that pretty much most of NPM's package index consists only of weekend prototype projects that are abandoned afterwards. It's sad to see that there's literally no baseline of quality measurements on NPM, and people give them stars far too quickly, without realizing that it's literally a single line of code with megabytes of useless testing around it.

Most of the patterns in UI/UX frameworks that come and go all the time are actually very very old paradigms that have been known in Computer Science since the 60s-70s. I always feel like no one reads a book about Software Engineering or Software Patterns anymore, let alone tries to find patterns in alternatives and makes a pro/contra list of features to find out what they actually want.

All go hush hush and rush rush to put out their next starlet on GitHub, without actually thinking about a software architecture anymore. Those that do are somehow invisible to the masses; and can never gain really a traction behind their ideas, which leads to the abandoned code problem either way.

mewpmewp22• 5 years ago

It really depends on the situation. Some stuff you won't need one month into future, other stuff you'll need for decades. Manage your efforts wisely. Time after all is limited.

Many companies wouldn't have existed if they didn't move fast and tried to perfect everything instead of prioritising getting to market.

Don't put the same level of care into the weekend side web app you are creating for fun as to the rocket ship you are building.

joekrill• 5 years ago

It's not mentioned specifically, but I think this very much falls into the "Accidental complexity" bucket. In the same way he describes someone choosing to use Mathematica for solving a problem - a developer choosing an obscure technology or writing poor code is just more accidental complexity.

peterohler2• 5 years ago

I think you are using the wrong building blocks. Build your own blocks or use ones that are solid with good test coverage and many of those issues go away.

nsm• 5 years ago

I really like Dorian Taylor's analogy of software to movie production: https://doriantaylor.com/softwares-ailing-mythology Their point is that software is a refinement of a process to the point where it can be executed by a computer (in a generally bug-free manner). Just like a movie spends a lot of time in pre-production and writing the script, we must spend a lot of time on refining our own understanding of our processes, before trying to explain them to computer via code. The faster one jumps to code, the more likely one is to have to go back and fix things, delaying the delivery of software.

So software is more similar to writing novels or movies, than construction, where a lot of time is spent just thinking through things, and going through the ups and downs of "writer's block". Perhaps one way out is to loosen the delineation between making software and using software (a la spreadsheets, Smalltalk) and moving towards more programmable environments, so one doesn't deliver software, but rather allow users to build their own as part of refining their processes.

known• 5 years ago

Expectations != Requirements

TuringTest7• 5 years ago

Which points straight to the problem: the tools for expectation management, requirements gathering and design validation are severely lacking.

Applications should be built on fast iterations with the user present, until each detail is perfect and the full workflow is validated to be as useful as expected. Only then should engineering issues be addressed, to make the tool robust and fast.

marklit• 5 years ago

Aren't most developers in the world paid a salary or day rate and thus are paid for their time? What incentive is there for them to "hurry up" rather than sandbag?

ohadron• 5 years ago

I want to say stock options, but I don’t really think it achieves this goal.

fxtentacle4• 5 years ago

I concur.

Stocks are too far away from the actual software. The CEOs stupid pet project might well ruin the company's financials, even though all of the engineers on the core team did a fantastic and highly profitable job.

So stocks are more bets on the CEOs performance than on the engineers'.

fxtentacle4• 5 years ago

Plus they usually get no financial compensation for the extra work of making things work well.

There's a minimum quality level required to not get fired, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's exactly what most employees deliver.

mrwoggle• 5 years ago

Of course, why go through the troubles of putting in the extra hours, if there is no financial compensation or appreciation?

Personally, I would just optimize stuff or propose new features for a product if I would learn something/gain experience out of it.

errantmind2• 5 years ago

Agreed. I would go further and say that is true of any salaried employee who has no significant stake in the business

godot• 5 years ago

On a somewhat separate topic and line of thinking than the post (Great article btw, I agree with it completely) -- I've often thought that, as a software engineer, whenever giving estimates, any number of management folks must be thinking "why does it take so long?". And I think part of the reasons is this. If you simply _ignore_ most of the accidental complexity, you often can build 80% of the functionality of a requested product/feature in 20% of the time or less. What's more, for any upper management who's worked in the industry long enough, over the past two decades, they've most likely worked with some whiz kid who had done it (I was one myself in my early 20s a decade+ ago) -- so they know it can be done and have witnessed it.

Let's say the requested product is some CRUD web app. At one point in their career, this executive worked in a growing tech startup and on the team was a talented fresh grad. That engineer built a product very similar to that entirely, front and back ends, in two days. 15 years later you're working in a different company as an executive and you're talking about building some CRUD web app just like that. Why is the estimates being given by the dev team 4 weeks with 4 developers?

What wasn't seen and remembered was that the one built in two days by the smart kid had no unit tests (or any kind of tests), didn't cover many edge cases (at least in its first version), a UI with barebones CSS, no responsive layout, no component-based frontend (e.g. React), no scalability concerns, etc. But all the requested functionality is there, it's demo-able, and usable even. A similar product is being requested now, but it needs to be built to withstand today's quality standards, robustness, maintainability, etc. So unit tests are part of the requirements, a component-based frontend is needed for maintainability, you have to handle mobile, etc.

It's pretty much all the same points the author is pointing out about accidental complexity; just kind of showing why someone would ask that question.

errantmind2• 5 years ago

It sounds like the kid in your example built an MVP product for the executive to demonstrate/test business value. Expectations matter. If the executive thought that was a finished product and is holding everyone to that standard, they were mistaken. I don't see any reason to write extensive unit tests, a component-based frontend, responsive layout, and scalable architecture for the first draft of a product. In my opinion, the first draft of a product in a business environment should test business value of the idea as rapidly as possible, as many of the ideas are half-baked

fxtentacle4• 5 years ago

"the last 20 years has been the drastic reduction in the ratio of essential to accidental complexity"

I know this is nitpicking, but the author is using mathematics as an example and then uses ratio the wrong way... The point he/she is trying to make is that tools got better. That would mean the accidental complexity goes down. That means the ratio of essential to accidental complexity goes up.

Silhouette4• 5 years ago

I wondered about that as well, because much of the content in the middle of the article, where the author lists changes in the industry such as automated infrastructure and frequent deployments, would suggest to me that accidental complexity really has increased and the author's statement is actually correct as written even if that wasn't the intent.

fn1• 5 years ago

Because we don't dare making bold decisions like:

* Throw out all MySQL/MariaDB installations and replaced them with PostgreSQL because it is objectively, provably better.

* Stop writing build-systems in untyped languages, because they are less productive when used by a team.

MangoCoffee• 5 years ago

Throw out all MySQL/MariaDB

that's reaching. there are many successful software build on top of mysql/mariadb.

replaced them with PostgreSQL because it is objectively, provably better

"provably better"? that's not reasonable enough.

lukeramsden• 5 years ago

that's reaching. there are many successful software build on top of mysql/mariadb.

That doesn't make them better or even good. There is also successful software built on CGI scripts, but I'm not going to go and say that Go/Node/C#/etc aren't provably better than that.

simonbarker87• 5 years ago

Did you read the article? The author doesn’t mention any specific technologies as the source of the problem but instead the increase in expectations of what software can do, how it is made and the complexity incurred because of that.

FriedrichN• 5 years ago

I've used MySQL/MariaDB for over 10 years (as well as MSSQL, Sybase, PostgreSQL, SQLite and any others I forgot) and I've had minimal problems with them. No more problems than I've had with any other DB system.

Edit: I also used MongoDB and hated it.

jeofken• 5 years ago

Why is MariaDB worse than PG? Maria has temporal tables which I make great use of

InvOfSmallC2• 5 years ago

I've used both MySQL/MariaDB and PostgreSQL. They are perfectly equivalent and do their job pretty fine in my experience of 500req/s

Silhouette4• 5 years ago

We are asking more and more of our software.

Are we, though? This assumption merits deeper scrutiny. It's obviously true sometimes, but does it really generalise?

In terms of functional requirements, we use lots of online software today that is far simpler than its traditional desktop equivalents in feature set. Many successful SaaS businesses are providing tools to help businesses organise that are often barely more complicated in terms of features than the freeware/shareware applications that used to be everywhere, often written by a single person or a small team, running natively on your desktop! It turned out that a lot of the extra complexity in the huge programs we used to run on desktops and corporate servers wasn't offering a good return on investment and the trend has been to simplify over time. That might be an improvement for both developers and users, but it certainly doesn't mean we're asking more of that software.

In terms of non-functional requirements, connectivity is obviously a big change compared to 20 years ago. Today, a simple CRUD app might be running online and the data can be reached from anywhere by anyone, or by multiple anyones at the same time. That could be much more convenient even if the data itself is little different or even simpler than it used to be. And there are very significant overheads in implementing real-time, distributed, concurrently accessible systems compared to old school desktop and database applications, so in this area we certainly are asking a lot more of much modern software.

But beyond that, what else are we asking more of in terms of non-functional requirements? We're setting the bar low on performance for most of the software that gets written today, relying on ever faster and larger hardware to make up for running less efficient code. As anyone who actually wrote serious software on the systems of 20 or 30 years ago can testify, that makes life far easier for programmers and requires much less knowledge and skill. Today, the skill set that resulted in heavily optimised code a few decades ago is mostly found among developers working in fields like embedded systems where resource constraints are still often tight, but otherwise it's another area where we're asking far less of our software than we used to.

I think the article was more on target with its highlighting of essential and accidental complexity. The extra processes and tools and infrastructure add a great deal of extra complexity today, and I am far from convinced that much of that complexity is really justified, particularly when it's attached to such a transient, throwaway culture where little is built to last and developers jump ship every five minutes. It might be very un-PC and/or career-limiting to suggest building software any other way today, though.

forgotmypw175• 5 years ago

I agree, feels like we've conditioned to accept software playing dumb and being unreliable.

A couple decades ago, random glitches attracted much scrutiny, today we just take it for granted.

joshuamorton• 5 years ago

Is that really true? I remember routine blue screens and system hard-crashes a couple decades ago. They're not commonplace today. We're primed to remember the past rosily.

kakwa_• 5 years ago

I kind of have the exact opposite in term of feelings.

Seeing Windows 95 or 98 going into a BSoD was far more common than today with Windows 10.

I also remember seeing Netscape crashing extremely frequently toward the end of the first browser war.

By comparison, today, a modern browser is doing a lot more things, but very rarely crashes in my experience.

Overall, in term of software quality, I think things have improved, specially thanks to:

* the maturing of tools like compilers, dependency managers, linters, unit tests frameworks, etc.

* the widespread adoption of development technics ensuring better quality (CI, unit tests, code coverage, automated integration tests, etc).

* the development of common building blocks such as libraries and frameworks, which enabled projects to not "re-invent the wheel" every time for low level stuff. These building blocks also being generally widely used, battle tested and more reliable than in house implementations.

* the development of OSS which drastically increase the accessibility of the previously mentioned building blocks to developers.

Both technically and methodologically, software development has seen tons of improvements since the late 90ies, early 2000.

cccc4all• 5 years ago

It takes long time to build anything of value, software is no different.

There are many variables in building software, which roughly break down to budget, resources and time. All these variables must be managed carefully to deliver software of quality and value. There are several strategies that mitigate the process of building software and manage tradeoffs between budget, resources and time.

There's no one size fits all solution that can reduce time without accounting for budget and resources.

caseyross• 5 years ago

Software takes a long time to build because it's always new.

That is, software is trivially copy-able, so there is no reason to spend effort duplicating any software that already exists. (Legal reasons and "not-invented-here" syndrome notwithstanding.) This is a huge different from how the "real" world works, where almost all of the work involved in building, say, a car, is actually just the work of assembling identical copies of that product so that it can be physically sold to more than one person.

The insane amounts of repeated effort involved in building any physical product at scale have a silver lining, in that the repetition enables a very good and stable estimate of how long another repetition will take. Software is the opposite situation --- we only need to build anything once, but not having built that thing before, we don't really know how long it will take.

TuringTest7• 5 years ago

If that were true, it wouldn't take long to build from scratch a functionally identical clone of an existing application. Yet it does.

The conclusion is that the tools to build software from a known specification to working code are sub-optimal.

xmprt• 5 years ago

That's like saying a Ford F150 is functionally identical to a Ford Model A because they are both cars. The specific implementation under the hood requires a lot of work. And very rarely do people ever make functionally identical clones without massive refactoring to allow for extensibility.

toast0• 5 years ago

The conclusion is that the tools to build software from a known specification to working code are sub-optimal.

That may be true, but I don't know that your example supports it.

Cloning an app doesn't mean you had a specification for the app. The tools to build a known specification from an existing app are sub-optimal, as are the tools to build a known specification from scratch.

I've only rarely in my career had the benefit of a written specification.

krisoft• 5 years ago

I don’t want to sound smartass but building an identical clone of an existing application is very fast and often totally automated. That’s what your compiler chain does.

etripe• 5 years ago

While your second sentence is definitely true, there are some subtleties that also matter.

Car specs are (certainly as opposed to software specs) very exact and constrained by dimensions, chemistry and physics. None of those have version numbers.

Creating a particular model of a car is decidedly single-paradigm. The same cannot be said for a functionally identical clone. You could make a functionally identical clone of an app in OOP or FP, nodejs, Rust or C++, MVC, MVVM or MVU, as a polyglot SPA + backend combination...

All this to say: software as an industry also lacks standardisation, process documentation and documented best practices. Software "best practices" are more like "accepted dogma at the time" or "least likely to bite us later", not "will work 99.999% of the time". Software as a product is immaterial to start with.

sriku2• 5 years ago

Software takes a long time to build because it's always new.

And yet it feels like authentication and authorization code need to be rewritten for every application.

danielheath• 5 years ago

I don’t rewrite bcrypt, and authorisation is intrinsically linked to your data model.

Cthulhu_• 5 years ago

Not in my experience; basic session auth is easy enough, and oauth has been around for a while now.

What keeps giving though is CRUD. Naming things, forms, APIs, persistence, every time, rinse and repeat.

threatofrain• 5 years ago

Only vendor-specific code, so it's not that bad. What business do most people have rewriting auth stuff?

xorcist• 5 years ago

That's because it is mostly integration that is done, not so much construction. AA needs to permeate the whole project, from the details of a function call to high level design like making sure an actor can call another part of the software stack to perform an otherwise unauthorized operation.

"Building" software can mean any number of things. When you get down to the specifics, there is no getting around using specific language.

TeMPOraL4• 5 years ago

I think focusing on this comparison to the real world assemblies and constructions doesn't yield much insight. The equivalent of a car being assembled is a compiler building an executable from source. You can consider factories to be just very, very long compiles, and forget about it.

The question of why software takes a long time to build pertains to the coding phase, to which real life's analogue is drafting/design phase. It is my impression that the drafting/design phase in "hard" industries can be just as messy and hard to schedule as software development is - we just don't pay attention, because for physical products, drafting/design is nearly free (capex & opex of the assembly phase dominates), whereas in software, the construction is nearly free (compiler time is too cheap to meter).

It's true that, on the surface, software is "always new". But after doing it for a while, I have this sinking feeling that a lot of it is old and repetitive work that we hadn't yet automated - there are deep similarities between pieces of code we're writing, but we don't have a language to fully capture them and abstract them away.

BerislavLopac• 5 years ago

The equivalent of a car being assembled is a compiler building an executable from source

I disagree. The equivalent of a car being assembled is copying the binary executable from one storage medium to another; building an executable from source would be the equivalent of building the production process for a single car model, while coding is the equivalent of designing and testing that model.

TheOtherHobbes• 5 years ago

I thought the original article was very poor. There's no real data, no references (except Fred Brooks), and the graphs are just nice shaded opinions based on nothing much.

It fails to ask why the complexity of tools and systems grows over time, and whether this is matched by improvements in UX.

It also fails to note that one of the goals of abstraction is to hide inherent complexity. And in fact this happens time and time again in engineering and product design - an insight that starts off requiring near-genius levels of original mathematical creativity is packaged into commodified tools that make it easy to do a certain job.

Sometimes the tools are aimed at engineers, and sometimes they're built for the public. But because no one expects to literally reinvent the wheel, they all package genius in their different ways.

Except software. In software teams keep working to reinvent wheels completely every few years. Some are arguably more refined than existing wheels. But they're all wheels.

They're not a new kind of thing - like an engine. Or wings.

So I agree. Software has mediocre lumpy wheels They're mostly back-references to existing software, and not so much attempts to commodify and simplify standard problems - like security, reliability, scalability, and UX.

There are packages for all of the above, but they're rarely clean and elegant - in the sense that someone has really understood the problem and designed a maximally effective but minimally complex automated solution.

Worse, there are no processes for efficiently abstracting a domain. And that's what's missing.

Leherenn• 5 years ago

for physical products, drafting/design is nearly free (capex & opex of the assembly phase dominates)

It really depends on the industry. It's particularly bad in heavily regulated industries (pharma, aerospace, ...). On the other hand, creating a blog is probably the equivalent of designing a new t-shirt.

HeyLaughingBoy• 5 years ago

I agree. Software is "always new" but it often shouldn't be.

I work for an engineering services firm that does mostly embedded systems. I push hard for reuse, basing our work on standard platforms, etc. Unfortunately, client needs vary so much -- one client might need a wearable, another wants a large system that is mounted on a skid, another needs something to sit on a desktop, all with hugely different feature sets -- that it's difficult to find a small set of devices that we can reuse. So one of our big problems is that we're very often bidding on a project that uses a device, or a technology we've never seen before and that's where the uncertainty comes in.

Patterns certainly help, higher-level languages would definitely help (I'm the only one in the organization programming small processors in C++, everyone else is only comfortable with C), but that's a slow, risky change.

lazysheepherd• 5 years ago

Best comparison (car/machine manufacturing vs software development) I've ever heard on this topic is as following;

While producing a machine, there are two steps;

1) designing the blueprint (takes a lot of time, unpredictable)

2) mass production (takes a lot of time, predictable)

Those steps in software development;

1) building the software (takes a lot of time, unpredictable)

2) deploying the code (takes virtually no time, predictable)

So the real difference is this: software is almost all about doing something new, each and every time. It's all flesh and has no bone: e.g. devoid of a long, very stable and predictable mass production stage. It's almost all about R&D, all of it's length. Hence 98% of the process is novel work therefore takes time and hard to predict.

fendy3002• 5 years ago

And add to that the number of custom software are many times more than most things in real life. Nobody will asks for their BMW to transport a cow, or for their BMW to connect / communicate with other's Mercedes.

But we often asked for accounting app to able to handle employee's payroll and paid leaves.

Then with that many demand for custom software, we also got many times software manufacturer than car manufacturer. Inexperienced manufacturer (programmer) will make development even slower. Not to mention that the client even don't know what they want.

Izkata• 5 years ago

Every once in a while when I see an example of an absurdity that wouldn't happen, I head off to Google to see what I can find.

Nobody will asks for their BMW to transport a cow

How about a cow transporting a BMW?

https://carnewschina.com/2013/02/22/bmw-owner-in-china-is-an...

Justsignedup• 5 years ago

To note. All engineering has this problem.

Yes, building cars in a factory yields repetitive results, but what about all the different engineering projects. The truth is that this is not a new problem, we just lack discipline of fields that have been refined over thousands of years.

Because of the quick idea to prototype rate, product research and refinement takes a back seat. All engineering projects have massive research before the first stone is placed. Nobody mid way through building a sky scraper decides "oh, do we need to redo the foundation?"

I would also like to note, nobody is gonna give a self-taught architect who's 19 the ability to build that skyscraper foundation. Each building technique is developed, tested, and then once determined good, is actually used by others, and supervised by an industry veteran with underlings who learn and eventually themselves supervise such projects. Meanwhile in software it is the opposite.

Not to say that there isn't a reason software grows so fast. Things change daily. If software worked like architecture we'd be licensing even the right to use ruby on rails-style modeling. But software works differently, thus faster iteration, thus more loosey-goosey, thus harder to estimate.

pintxo• 5 years ago

I would also like to note, nobody is gonna give a self-taught architect who's 19 the ability to build that skyscraper foundation. Each building technique is developed, tested, and then once determined good, is actually used by others, and supervised by an industry veteran with underlings who learn and eventually themselves supervise such projects. Meanwhile in software it is the opposite.

It's a bit less black and white: Any 6+ year old might build his own tree house, while in reality no one will let a self-taught kid write the control software for a nuclear power plant.

SMFloris• 5 years ago

I think software takes longer to build now than it did before even with all our software advancements. Abstracting the market requirements completely, the new technologies are very slow to create an mvp out of.

For example, a week ago I started a Symfony (php framework) project and let it on default server side rendered setup. I bought a $20 css+html template. I created some entities and then just inserted a form for that entity into an html file using one line of code. It took me less than 1h to do this, with containerization and db setup and figuring out how things work in Symfony.

It blew my mind. I totally forgot how easy it was and I could focus on the things that mattered. To do the same thing in React/Angular would have taken me much longer since I simply had to build 2 things (a frontend and a backend). I think this is why today software takes longer to build: You simply have to build more behind the scenes so that the end customer sees a form/page/button.

TuringTest7• 5 years ago

My take is that programming languages have an inadequate ratio between abstract and concrete data flows.

You are supposed to build code by stitching together commands for all the data handling functions required to handle each case in the data. Yet development environments make it really hard to actually _see_ what effect the functions are having on the data. You need to enter a special debug mode and place strategic breakpoints, logs and watched expressions, instead of making easy to compare the full program state before and after executing each function.

In that respect, spreadsheets and reactive functional languages make it easier to prototype new software fast, since they have close together both functions and the data on which the functions operate; and in spreadsheets, you also get the intermediate steps for chains of functions.

TuringTest7• 5 years ago

I'm also surprised that no one's yet mentioned Bret Victor's work.

http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

His visual interactions for programming are a great advance in the state of the art for fast development, and they've greatly influenced recent advances in development environments - making everything more reactive, and with code and data more intertwined.

einpoklum• 5 years ago

I don't know that it takes that long to build software.

That is, the expectation that software be immediately available because you can vaguely imagine what it would do for you is strange.

jillesvangurp• 5 years ago

A lot of accidental complexity arises from adding more people to the mix. There is the communication overhead to deal with. Even when things go well this consumes time. When it doesn't: more time. Then there's of course the constant arguing and bickering over what is best; more people means more opinions on this. And of course the more people you have the more complexity gets introduced. Conway's law is a thing.

The benchmark for me is what I think I can pull off in a few days vs. what I would build with a whole team in a few months. You can build a lot in a weekend. But not not with a whole team around you questioning every move. So, when I need quick results, I give the right people a lot of freedom and not too many distractions and see what happens.

I'm building a new webapp for a startup with a few people since three weeks. We're launching with customers next month. That involves a lot of pragmatic decision making and taking on a few risks. Most of the hard choices were made in the first week and at this point the app is starting to look alright.

Here's what we did not do: we had no designers involved. We also had no lengthy meetings about what features we were going to have. We're patching up our existing backend and adding some new features to it.

Otherwise, it's an emergency rebuild of an app that just wasn't good enough (wrong mobile platform, developer is out of the picture, and it's a lot of technical debt and stability issues). I took the decision in December and gave our inexperienced frontend person some guidance to investigate the technologies I picked for him. By December we had a clear idea that this was doable. January we started doing this. That's 3 weeks ago. By now it's largely done. We're adding a few missing features and then we have an MVP that will run on IOS, Android and the web.

If I had a few million, I could not do this any faster. But I'd be able to ship beautifully native apps six months later. If fast is a goal, keep your team lean.

fuzzfactor• 5 years ago

When you throw as many coders on to a project as anybody has ever done, in order to rush to the goal with maximum urgency, those man-months really add up fast and it does end up taking longer in the end because of it but look how many people got to the goal and it wouldn't have been possible without all those executive-months struggling to move the goalposts toward the team as much as possible before everything craters.

If you were committed to efficient progress to reach your original goal you're going to need a different approach.

And start all over again.

Carefully read every word of their comments from the programmer having two decades of single-handed operation, and the 42-year corporate retiree now making single handed progress himself, these are long comments but here's an excerpt:

This all being said, one of the major causes of complexity in software development, which has always been an impediment to quality productivity is the ridiculous demand for unsuited deadlines in development efforts. This is a result of weak and incompetent management that runs up and out of the technical departments right up to division heads and the like. Deadlines, cause their own deference to the development of complexities, which often include defects. Deadlines cause stress and other factors, which often disallow most developers from thinking out their designs and problems clearly with time to tinker with the best solutions.

NiceWayToDoIT• 5 years ago

In an average replicate (FB, HN, Twitter) tutorial, students can see how with an amazing developer skills, someone creates the finished product from 15 minutes to 2 hours. But, when they try to do the same, it takes days, weeks or months. And this also applies to an experienced developer; the reason is depth. (How deep to the rabbit hole do we want to go). There are always hidden complexities, configuration, installations, validations, issues, known obstacles and unknown obstacles; there is time for meetings, negotiations, time for thinking, time for merely trying to come up with the best approach long before we start coding.

A good example from my early career was "just one field in the database", a client says "hey this will take you just 1 minute, why you are arguing with me about this", but that "one field" is so much intertwined that can affect half of the codebase. It means, going through all procedures, views, models, tests, validations, then there is an impact on historical data etc...

Also there is a huge difference between: spike, MVP, and finished product.

godmode2019• 5 years ago

Just think about building a simple saas website.

What do you need

A marketing page A dashboard set of elements A payment system A billing history, refund, change card, invoice system A token system A auth system A email system or integration with a email provider. A complaint system A admin dashboard A often custom database schema A analytics system and useage A log tracker A cloud infrastructure for hosting Rate limiting A api A event logging system A marketing blog

I have strayed too far.

My point is each one if these things is usually build from scratch. It takes a lot of time, then you have to wire everything together. In typical custom ways. If someone makes a off the shelf version typically the learning curve is greater than building a custom version.

I think software takes so log because each dev tries to rebuild the wheel. And often times the wheel does need to be rebuilt. But due to time issues things never get finished to the degree you planned and your custom code has been rewritten 10 times and each new feature take a logx longer to not break the old stuff.

tonyedgecombe• 5 years ago

I wonder if part of this is because the commercial pressures aren't there, that there is so much money sloshing about the industry that we can get away with sloppy practices.

InvOfSmallC2• 5 years ago

What does it mean long? Long for whom? Your client? The final customer?

In general, in my experience, the software can go wrong due to humans being present in the process.

There are mainly 3 types of humans: engineers, product people, customers (clients).

These 3 types of people sometimes lose track of what is really important in terms of features and engineering.

Overengineering and overfeatures kill time to market.

Keep it simple.

pajko• 5 years ago

For me, the main thing causing slowdowns is the bad quality or complete lack of documentation about how the existing/external APIs work, and a big part of the development is trial-and-error.

junippor• 5 years ago

When someone asks "Why does it take so long to build software?" and you want to verify whether said person has any intelligent thoughts on the matter, ask them: "How long do you think it should take to build software?"

username903• 5 years ago

How long do you think it should take to build software?

About as long as it takes to figure out what the software should do. Add one day for each 1000 lines of code for typing carefully and adding automated tests.

napier• 5 years ago

Programmers rarely think like users or in the case of business or specialist software, those who have domain knowledge; and vice versa. Skill barriers to contribution remain high and efforts to scale them like ‘low-code’ tools seem forever in their infancy. You rarely get a rounded combination of required developer-designer-user qualities in one individual or small team.

Nor is there, in my opinion, widely distributed recognition of this within the industry. There still exists a lack of formalized design methodology enabling to processes to flow through iteratively from ideation, to prototyping, to production. Costs and time taken snowball as a result and project failure rates remain high compared to other engineering disciplines.

I think the high profit payoffs and normative structures due to distribution costs being marginal contribute to the stickiness of this comfy buy rickety state of affairs.

cryptica• 5 years ago

Maybe because successful companies in tech got rich so quick that their leaders never learned how to code properly. None of the developers who work for big successful companies know how to code efficiently. Initially, they were hacking together all the code as quickly as possible (of course that didn't scale and had to be rewritten completely) and then they later got enough money to just brute-force development by throwing hundreds of developers at it.

Then they started pushing their naive ideas to everyone else (e.g. static typing, functional programming, 100% unit test coverage, Elixir...) and they put 0 focus on stuff that really matters such as keeping method parameters and return values as simple as possible, consuming events using for-await loops instead of event listener callbacks, naming variables well, separation of concerns, etc...

So now most of the industry knows two kinds of code: Dirty hacks or bureaucratic bloatware. Nobody knows how to code properly. There is nobody around to teach people the correct approach and there are a lot of people around to teach the incorrect approach.

tom_walters• 5 years ago

I fundamentally disagree with the conclusions of this article.

It doesn't take long to "build software" - git was built in a weekend, Facebook a similar timeline. When the environment is right there's no upper bound on the pace of delivery, it's just that modern day dev is, in many places, less about quality of the output (in terms of product/market fit and user value, not code quality) and more about the satisfaction of ceremony. You couldn't product manage Google into existence, or any truly valuable piece of software, hardware, or any other innovation, but it's customary for organisations to create structures which feel grown-up in order to yield software.

The talents now required to enter the field are also different, which has naturally played a part in the perceived slow-down. Development is a new field, and research into what makes teams effective is limited - we're still using the ideas of industrial steel production to try and bolster the present manufacturing line. This means there are plenty of undesirable behaviours.

But ultimately, it's about what you're optimising for. If you hire outstanding people and give them an excellent brief, you can deliver incredible software at pace. Most modern companies don't optimise for this, it's more about satisfying sprawling teams, polishing egos, and chasing incremental gains. In that environment you can bet delivery is slow.

jstimpfle2• 5 years ago

That's an overstatement. You can build impressive MVP and tech demos in a short amount of time, yes. But that requires that the author has already been thinking about the types of problems that come up in this domain for a long long time. Rest assured that Git certainly hasn't been created in a weekend.

Also, you can't create a product in this short amount of time. (There are some websites that do almost nothing at all, and that are very profitable, but those aren't engineering problems). Think how long git has been maintained, polished, and extended since its inception. And still people complain.

Software is a learning process, otherwise people wouldn't be so obsessed about it. And learning takes time. No matter which way you're approaching it.

ozim• 5 years ago

I agree, saying Git was created in a weekend is like saying olympic gold medalist in 100m dash won competition in 10 seconds. Linus was working with DVCS software already and was annoyed with it so he had an idea on how to do it, he did not came up with it on Saturday like it never existed and coded it on Sunday.

Other part about Facebook - well if you take first version that was just well photos + some description and disregard all stuff that was refined next years where it started to be real product instead of novelty page for Harvard students.

In a company I work for we built first version of application in 1-2 years to catch up with what other companies already had and what customers expected. We could do really simplistic version in a weekend but no one would pay for it.

HPsquared2• 5 years ago

Git was "born" in a weekend, but the overall gestation would have taken much longer.

peterohler2• 5 years ago

While using git as an example is a bit over simplifying I agree with the comment. Over time, if you plan ahead, your build up a set of building blocks and at some point you can put together an application very quickly. I suppose it is all relative though. While a month might seem fast to me someone else might expect a solid, fully featured application in a day or a weekend.

gilbetron• 5 years ago

Git wasn't built in a weekend: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2015/04/10-years-of-git...

And git wasn't even built in 10 days, as Linus has said elsewhere. The core structure was, kind of. But there's been a large effort on top of that.

And the idea that Facebook was built in a weekend is just completely wrong. Sure, some basic Facebook-ish app was created over a weekend, sorta.

mbrodersen2• 5 years ago

Nope. Linus spend years developing the software in his head before writing anything. Writing software is thinking not typing.

jcun4128• 5 years ago

Eh pointless gripe but if this is a blog/article should omit that intercom widget or whatever on that page.

KingOfCoders• 5 years ago

Too long often means forgetting the iceberg principle [1] by Joel Spolsky. Business people only see the tip of the iceberg, the UI button, but don't see the huge chunk below water. This chunk is complex and not UI and takes time to develop or change.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/02/13/the-iceberg-secret...

zmmmmm• 5 years ago

Many valid comments and points of view.

This is but one part of it, but what I see is that software has a uniqueness to it because so much of the complexity is hidden. Really, nobody can see it being created except the actual developer building that piece and maybe one level up if they are good enough to review the code. But to everybody else its a mysterious black box. Now this not only hides the complexity but actually amplifies it because at the ground level people are highly incentivised to inject complexity into their work. It feels good to make something complex. You feel productive and it definitely helps your resume if you can claim to have worked on something highly complex. Everybody else is impressed. The team gets more resources to support this amazing thing being created.

So hiding the complexity not only prevents exposure but means many people in the production chain incentivised to create complexity can get away with gratuitously injecting it into things. Whole frameworks will be deployed where 10 lines of code would have worked, new libraries will mysteriously appear and get used for 1 function. Layers of indirection in the design will appear to abstract things that have only 1 concrete implementation. etc etc. All of this is invisible above 1 management layer and therefore unmeasurable and unmanageable. But the outcome is, the end result takes much longer than you would surmise from the bare bones functionality or requirements.

qwertox• 5 years ago

What I find the most painful is that you can't rely on much to decrease accidental complexity.

A couple of years ago I settled on the JavaScript Dojo Framework. It was the most solid framework available, but then AngularJS came out, and it had some very compelling arguments on it's side.

So I moved over to AngularJS, being happy that there finally a good, modern solutions to many problems.

Then Angular 2 came. Then AngularJS 1.x stopped being updated. Angular 2 was nowhere near what I needed, so I had to find an alternative.

I switched to Vue, being really happy about it. Now I'm finding myself in the transition to Vue3, where frameworks like Quasar still need to get ported and it is unclear what will happen to all the code I already wrote.

Or Python2 vs Python3.

All this progress makes me feel burned out, barely having time to tackle the actual problem to be solved.

cjfd• 5 years ago

"splitting it up" is only accidental complexity if one splits things up in services. If one has a monolith I would argue that "splitting it up", in that case known as 'improving coherence' and 'reducing dependency' is much easier and falls under essential complexity.

Generally, I would say that tools are a very big part of it. One example. Why did we go from svn to git again? O yes, git can do so much more. But now you actually have to do all of these 'so much more' things. This gives you a very beautiful commit history if you do it well but is a very beautiful commit history really that important? You tell me.... maybe it is and maybe it isn't and maybe it depends on the nature of the project....

hamandcheese• 5 years ago

I think there is a cost disease in software where baseline requirements only increase depending on the maturity of a company. Accessibility, localization, scalability, permissioning, observability and alerting, reliable deploy and testing pipeline... all these things are table stakes for a new project at the company I work at, represent A LOT of complexity, yet an application delivered without them might have a nearly identical user experience...

That’s not even to mention the added burdens on the planning side of things, e.g. getting infosec and legal and compliance to sign off before breaking ground, gathering requirements from 10 different teams across the world, appeasing more stakeholders, etc.

The difference just in table stakes between a young startup and a mature company can easily account for an order of magnitude difference in effort required to deliver a feature, and it shouldn’t be surprising.

Edit: and this is why I weep when I see mature companies under-investing in developer tooling.

p0nce• 5 years ago

Writing software is basically going in debt, so you should write the 20% of software that will deliver 80% of the value. The problem begins when not considering costs and then being "surprised".

beckingz2• 5 years ago

Manager: "All those 'nice to have' things are too expensive. Let's cut them"

Manager, 3 months later: "Why are there no nice things in the software!"

wdiamond• 5 years ago

Software is like writing a book. A good book fits all new pieces in a new story and makes sense. A fast book is just copy of known pieces and known story and don't really fits well. A "PRO" in market steal not old ideas, a "PRO" in the field create detailed raw new sketchs that are not ready to sell.

kwanbix• 5 years ago

"... programming is an art form, whose real value can only be appreciated by another versed in the same arcane art; there are lovely gems and brilliant coups hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever, by the very nature of the process. You can learn a lot about an individual just by reading through his code, even in hexadecimal..."

noisy_boy• 5 years ago

I think it is relative. Compared to developing a car, a wordpress website can be completed in a relatively short time; an ERP system on the other hand will take substantially longer. It depends on what is being asked to be delivered when at what cost.

Putting that aside, there is a time creep factor because people don't place limits on the demands - ask and the developer can do it. So it is developed and now you need to ensure that the custom piece works reliably and doesn't break and so on. Compared to that, a house needs to be carefully designed upfront and there are limits to what modifications you can reasonably ask for down the line - you don't ask the builders to drag and drop the kitchen to the other side because you don't like how it looks on mobile.

bkirkby• 5 years ago

i believe one of the culprits for software taking so long is planning. this is alluded to in marty cagan's excellent book _Inspired_.

first, the caveat: a software dev project will take up as much time as is allotted to it. when you have more than enough time allotted for a project, most people either spend more time in research or allow themselves partial implementation paths of multiple solutions to help decide which one is best. on the other end of the project, every project can be polished forever. so dev projects will take as least as much time as has been allotted to it.

when we go through the planning process, it usually follows something like this:

1. dev estimates how many "points" (which translates into time in most peoples mind) to allot to a task. dev then pads it to account for dev optimism and wanting to make sure they have the chance of meeting the "committment" 2. program/project/product manager pads the number a bit further because they've been burned in the past on dev optimistic estimates and it's better to underpromise and overdeliver 3. dev proceeds on the task with the bloated estimate baked in and the task takes the full time allotted to it. it's baked inefficiency.

part of the problem is the concept of "committment" for estimates. good scrum organizations have changed that term to "prediction" instead of "committment" since this has been such a big problem. but even that isn't enough to solve the political capital lost when you "predict" wrong.

i think that any estimation above "t-shirt size" is going to bake this inefficiency into your process. the solution is less planning and more doing.

Cyberthal• 5 years ago

This answer is facile, but missing:

It takes so long to build software because it can. One can't construct a building forever. A novel is published and done. But software can be developed over its useful lifetime.

Similar followup:

The parts that take a long time, do so because the quick parts were finished quickly.

Lengthy software development isn't a problem with software, but rather reflects the frictionless malleability of code.

"Why does software dev take so long," isn't the same question as, "How to develop software more quickly?"

mbrodersen2• 5 years ago

Why does it take so long to make a movie/software? Because it is an act of invention. Yes the camera/widgets, lights/libraries are all reused. But the way they are reused is unique for each movie/application. And a large number of external constraints/forces impact how the movie/application is made. Yes you can quickly make an amateur movie/app in a few hours. People do it all the time. But that’s not the same as making AAA movies/software.

tabtab• 5 years ago

Typical internal CRUD applications took about 1/3 the time and 1/3 the coding to produce in my experience with the desktop IDE's of the late 90's. The web bloated things up so that you spend time hooking layers to more layers and debugging layers instead of focusing on business logic and UI in terms of users' needs. Now you micromanage technology instead of actual work.

People often say, "yes, but we have so much wonderful choice now!" Perhaps, but organizations are paying dearly for that choice.

Oracle Forms may have been esthetically ugly, but it did the CRUD job fairly well without fuss and muss, and developers were quite productive with it. The client was kind of a GUI browser so that you didn't need to install each application on each user's PC. It was also multi-platform. (Oracle mucked up the client by migrating it to Java applets.)

Some point out they don't work well on phones, but few of our apps are used on phones at our org. The UI was crippled to be mobile-friendly, but nobody is mobile-ing for real-work stuff. Make a special phone portal for the 5% or so of apps that need it instead of tangle up the 95% "incase" someday someone will want mobile. YAGNI.

If the industry would just learn to live with ugly K.I.S.S., they could save a lot of money and time. Warren Buffett says one of his greatest strengths is the courage to say "no". Few have that, and bloat the IT world as a result. Maybe fear of missing the Buzzword of the Week turns our stacks into buzzword pack-rats.

Why does it take so long to build software? (2020)

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