Problems with quick and dirty fixes in a software powered world

I really like the points made by Zeynep Tufeckci in her Medium post.

I particularly liked this line:

“We are building skyscraper favelas in code — in earthquake zones.”

“The big problem we face isn’t coordinated cyber-terrorism, it’s that software sucks. Software sucks for many reasons, all of which go deep, are entangled, and expensive to fix. (Or, everything is broken, eventually). This is a major headache, and a real worry as software eats more and more of the world.”

The quick and dirty fix is more expedient option for a large business. Once it gets too big to fail, then a business won’t be able to work on it without ‘downtime’ which will be unacceptable for a business critical system.

“The sane solution would have been to port the whole system to newer machines, fully, with new source code. But the company neither had the money nor the time to fix it like that, once and for all. So I wrote more code that intervened between the old programs and the old database, and added some options that the management wanted. It was a lousy fix. It wouldn’t work for the next thing that needed to be done, either, but they would probably hire one more person to write another layer of connecting code. But it was cheap (for them). And it worked (for the moment).”

Why the great glitch of July 8th should scare you | Medium | Zeynep Tufeckci, 2015