

David Parnas on Software Engineering - pmiller2
http://www.indwes.edu/Faculty/bcupp/lookback/SoftwareEngineering/DavidParnas.Poster.htm

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morphir
I wonder how accurate that statement actually is:

 _One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year. Hiring more bad
programmers will just increase our perceived need for them. If we had more
good programmers, and could easily identify them, we would need fewer, not
more._

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pmiller2
Most interesting bit for me:

> _What is the most often-overlooked risk in software engineering?_

>Incompetent programmers. [...] If we had more good programmers, and could
easily identify them, we would need fewer, not more.

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igrekel
Strange how in what I have seen so far, when things go really bad, it almost
never is a technical problem, its almost always a people's problem.

But he is still right that it is an often-overlooked problem and that we don't
even perceive it as a problem. In many organizations, people have just
accepted the effort and resources needed for building and maintaining software
even tough it could be much less.

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pchristensen
RE the incompetent programmers: Think of programmers as servers - you can
either scale up reliable, powerful components, or scale out weak, unreliable
components and make up the difference with process.

