Software is a bit unique in that the vouching process is really worth nothing at all. A licensed structural engineer, attorney, or doctor has professional liability for acts of negligence and malfeasance. The last time I checked, most commercial software is expected to have large numbers of defects. There are some costly products I can think of that are barely fit for purpose, and yet somehow the bad actors responsible for them aren’t sued out of existence or prohibited by law from practice.
I think if the industry trend is toward paying developers to verify or certify programs are logically sound and fit for purpose, then users will be getting a lot more value for the cost of developers’ time.
Reliability is worth everything. You never ever want to do work with unreliable people. If someone is convincingly lying without any incentive, you have to check every single thing they do and this is even more difficult than doing the work yourself.
I agree that this probably says a lot more about the lack of value these meetings provide the attendees. I’ve been to enough where the organizer will stall and small talk to stretch them out to the scheduled time that I know some people are using these events to fill out their time card.
I’m not seeing a lot of discussion about verification or a stronger quality control process anywhere in the comments here. Is that some kind of unsolvable problem for software? I think if the standard of practice is to use author reputation as a substitute for a robust quality control process, then I wouldn’t be confident that the current practice is much better than AI code-babel.
Imagine a world where if experts didn’t spend hundreds of hours learning the non transferable skills of VBA macros and Power-Noun integrations, but rather they spent the much less time developing a basic understanding of scripting and prompting and managed tabular data in ways vastly more powerful than excel in a way that is transparent and debugable. Would we not be much better off? Excel is not an engine of progress. It is an anchor.
Yes. Make them a front end to project database you pay someone to host. There is one source of truth for the whole team, front ends are tailored to design disciplines, and development branches are created as needed. This is an obvious product that would be a major improvement that doesn’t exist.
Bentley and Autodesk have a Frankenstein version of this because they can’t disrupt their revenue stream for CAD software that stopped improving 20 years ago. iTwin (yes, the branding is that bad) is an attempt to link cloud to local-file-based work. ProjectWise was a first stab at that, which is worse than plain network storage in every way except that CAD managers don’t have to be responsible for configuration scripts.
I think if the industry trend is toward paying developers to verify or certify programs are logically sound and fit for purpose, then users will be getting a lot more value for the cost of developers’ time.