Software is easy, right? Well, using it is easy. Writing it is hard. That’s why no network engineer wants to become a programmer. On the user side of the house it’s pretty easy to just install and run the app you need to use to get your job done. You’ll probably notice that my tongue is planted firmly in my cheek at this point.
There have been far too many occasions recently where I’ve had to resort to my knowledge of how systems and software work under the hood to diagnose issues. I’m someone that has an advanced certification in networking and I still find myself having to pull out all the stops to make something work regularly. Imagine how my mom must feel!
I’m not the only one that’s noticed this either. Drew DeVault has a wonderful write up from the software side of the house. His rant had me pumping my fist and ready to storm the castle. Check out a choice piece of snark from his wonderful post:
Honestly, it’s pretty embarrassing. Consider all of the stupid little things you’ve learned how to do in order to work around broken software. Often something as simple as refreshing the page or rebooting the program to knock some sense back into it — most users can handle that. There are much stupider problems, however, and they are everywhere. Every morning, I boot, then immediately hard-reboot, my workstation, because it seems to jigger my monitors into waking up properly to do their job. On many occasions, I have used the browser dev tools to inspect a broken web page to figure out how to make it do the thing I want to do, usually something complicated like submitting a form properly (a solved problem since 1993).
If you want to read more about all the things he sees wrong in this modern software reliability hellscape, make sure you check out the rest of his post here: Software Developers Have Stopped Caring About Reliability
