Ancestors

Toot

Written by Sasha Akhavi on 2025-01-18 at 20:07

Trying to think of any conventional #software team practice—any coding toolset, any #agile ceremony, any #ux #design research technique, anything — that did not evolve in order to ameliorate the problems of full-tilt, infallibility-complex programming in which people think we can simply code what should exist and ship it. Are 99% of our work practices meant to save us from ourselves? @GeePawHill @jessitron @RonJeffries @anthrocypher @PavelASamsonov any ideas?

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Descendants

Written by David Megginson on 2025-01-18 at 20:16

@sakhavi Not tagged here, but it's about trying to use technology to hide human failure rather than to reinforce human success.

If an org's internal operations are already messed up, automating them will only make things worse. But the bosses think they can buy their way out of the consequences of their poor management by writing more cheques, then the pressure lands on tech teams to fix the unfixable by smothering it in code.

@GeePawHill @jessitron @RonJeffries @anthrocypher @PavelASamsonov

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Written by David Megginson on 2025-01-18 at 20:21

@sakhavi I used to suggest that my consulting clients start by imagining we were designing the system for Victorian clerks on high stools with ink pots and goose quills.

They never nibbled, sadly, but the idea was to design a working human system first, and only then to see where adding modern tech here and there could make it more efficient.

It's always about the people, not the technology.

@GeePawHill @jessitron @RonJeffries @anthrocypher @PavelASamsonov

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Written by Pavel A. Samsonov on 2025-01-18 at 23:15

@david_megginson @sakhavi @GeePawHill @jessitron @RonJeffries @anthrocypher there's an old Weizenbaum interview where he talks about exactly this https://web.archive.org/web/20211002104454/http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html

Computers are being used to hide gaps in a lousy system with speed rather than invent a new system

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Written by David Megginson on 2025-01-18 at 23:16

@PavelASamsonov Thanks for the link!

@sakhavi @GeePawHill @jessitron @RonJeffries @anthrocypher

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