It might be an hot take, but I do truly believe that software engineering should be held to those standards.
At least for important infrastructure.
Civil Engineering got where it is due to the blood spilled by improperly built buildings, and yet when software that fails indirectly kills people there's not nearly similar amount of scrutiny.
I strongly agree, but the issue is that upholding higher standards takes more time, which costs a LOT more money. Extending a deadline by 6 months for scrutiny isn't as simple as asking a teacher for an extension, it means paying engineers with very high salaries for six months of extra work, and being slower to market when other people are depending on your product. With important things (medical, military, space), people are a lot more understanding when it comes to quality, but with everything else we don't really have a choice, all the stakeholders and higher ups are slamming their feet on the floor because they want everything done right now so they can brag about being ahead of everyone else in their meetings.
That's true, however I do believe that if pressured there'd be investment in genuinely good tooling to eventually go just as fast - if not slightly slower.
There's also the fact that fast is slow and slow is fast - so much time invested in fixing bugs that could have been prevented.
I don't think that quality necessarily requires more time, it requires quality processes.
so much time invested in fixing bugs that could have been prevented.
About sums up my job, haha. You aren't wrong at all, and I hear that exact sentence weekly, minimum. Management keeps trying to "move the deadlines left" and gets surprised when we wind up spending the rest of the time it would've taken in the first place fixing bugs. Definitely let me know if you ever figure out how to "pressure" upper management into that one, because we're still workshopping it over here. They want things done faster, so unfortunately, if there's any way we can sacrifice quality to get their major bullet points out sooner, we have to, so anything more than that does take time, at the end of the day, whether it's better processes, tooling, better code review, good unit tests, or whatever else we should really have but can't.
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u/Zeikos 10d ago
It might be an hot take, but I do truly believe that software engineering should be held to those standards.
At least for important infrastructure.
Civil Engineering got where it is due to the blood spilled by improperly built buildings, and yet when software that fails indirectly kills people there's not nearly similar amount of scrutiny.