

How Software is Harming Science, Engineering - TAnd
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/how-software-is-harming-science-engineering-08252011.html
Andreesen postulated that the software industry was "eating the world" and "poised to take over broad swathes of the economy." This is delusional.
======
SteveJS
The thesis that software is merely one component of many is certainly true.
The idea that we have too many software engineers however, seems false to me.
Also the idea that everyone needs to orient their career to serve a larger
societal good sounds like a prescription of goal oriented blindness. There are
plenty of inventions made for amusement that lead to larger societal good. If
someone feels passionate about aligning their life and career with larger
overall goals, that's great. However if someone working at Zygna is passionate
about games, perhaps they have an insight you don't and their contribution
will make a bigger difference to the world you think. Wadhwa's claim that
Andresson's portolio is 'unoriginal' seems irrelevant. Facebook is Friendster
3.0? From my point of view Facebook works, and friendster didn't. Isn't there
value in building something that actually works?

------
prodigal_erik
"Software is draining talent needed in other areas of science and engineering"
is begging the question. No matter what pretty lies we tell ourselves about
needing those other engineering projects, if they can't afford to bid for the
talent, we haven't bothered to allocate the resources that would enable them
to succeed. I would never advise those students to take the penalties for
diverging so far from what society actually wants from them, whatever I think
of social mobile gamification of cat pictures.

------
Apple-Guy
Actually, it's the lack of intellectual property protection of software (and
Microsoft's practice of ape and maim) that caused it to stagnant. Here's a
great article explaining why:

Are software patents evil? [http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2011/08/09/are-
software-patent...](http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2011/08/09/are-software-
patents-evil/)

------
Cmccann7
Isn't DNA profiling and decoding software dependent?

~~~
amirmc
I guess you could argue it's software- _enabled_ rather than software
dependent. The underlying scientific advances make it possible, whereas the
software makes it practicable.

