Software And Politics

Lately, there have been some considerations that politics should be excluded from wiki.

Instead, it would be probably a lot more profitable to take advantage of the passion poured into political/economical/social discussions [for the people who think wiki is a software development pattern repository: it no longer is for quite a while], to explore the links between software and politics.

Not only the petty corporate hierarchical politics that everybody's kind of used to. But with the big political/social/economical/ethical issues.

If you fail to see the link, let's start with 2 questions:

How do you think so many software engineers make so much money (no matter what, that is)?
How come an industry with an estimated failure rate of 50% (am I too generous?) is one of the most lucrative for its workforce?

The presumptive reason (hopefully somebody can contradict it) is that software development is in a position of power and is managing to trick the rest of society into paying more than what its output is worth. And, of course, we literally robbed a considerable amount of money from the rest of society, through the salaries and cashed stock options paid by DotGones.

The downside of this situation is that there are way too many software engineers, creating way too little social and economical value, and very often getting compensated for what amounts to nothing. There's also a very small core of software engineers producing a lot of value. There's a huge lack of correlation between output value (productivity) and the recompense over the range of the software development industry. Much of this gap has been supported by naive investors (and still is); another part has been traditionally supported by naive (gullible) customers that we manage to fool into paying ridiculous amounts of money for ridiculous projects, or even failed projects. --AnonymousToProtectTheGuilty1.

But at some point in the future the accounts will need to be settled, and when some decent balance is reached, many software engineers will need to change jobs (to say the least). Then we shall see politics.

One question - how are SoftwareEngineers more a problem here than, say salesmen, or Marketroids? It's arguable that Advertising is more powerful and corrisive to a society than software, yet nobody seems up in arms about the amount of money marketeers make and their political stances. --PeteHardie

Help set up the SociologyWiki and you'll see some fine rants about the evils of advertising. So the answer is that it's even more controversial than the politics of software, yet simultaneously much more off-topic here ....

Do we want to find our justification in the fact that there are others worse than us ? No, I don't think software engineers are more of a problem than sales people, tobacco companies, mercenaries, you name it. But that's not the subject of this page :) As a matter of fact if we can do a lot better of a job, we'll get rid of many salespeople, marketroids et comp., not without a political struggle, of course. But their role in the markets should be greatly diminished if we manage to actually build advanced information systems and not "put the data on the screen" kind of systems. --ATPG1

That was the first part. The second part is about where and how software development needs to evolve so that we can produce a dramatic shift in the value we offer to the rest of the world. We might think here of AI, knowledge management and all the other doomed (premature) projects that that have been set aside, while hoards of software engineers reinvented some wheels (just think how many "shopping carts" have been written for the last couple of years). Those might be the real gold mines, although we've been there before and failed to find the nuggets. --ATPG1.

One take: Because software development is a new and growing industry and the vast majority of people are fundamentally uneducated about the basic facts of software.

Agreed. Maybe uneducated is even too generous for what I've often seen in my limited experience. But those uneducated people pretending to be software engineers make lots of money for 0 or close to 0 value. As a matter of fact even some highly educated people get lots of money for sometimes ~0 value (failed projects, doomed projects that never had the slightest chance of success, outright scams). --ATPG1

'New' compounds 'uneducated'. 'Growing' means that Thomas Malthus and CharlesDarwin haven't fully come into play yet. According to these hypotheses, the prediction would be that the recent crash will show a positive effect on quality ... until the next big thing causes another growth spurt. It's like a GoldRush. Any fool can make a bundle when there's lots of gold to be found. It's only when the gold slows to a more steady trickle that efficiency really matters.

I think the analogy breaks down, because it's the lack of gold (results) that we are selling and getting money on it. The questions I wanted to raise are:

Is it ethical ?
Is it economically sustainable ? If not, when will the hell break loose and how ?
Can we do it any better in the short to medium term ?
Maybe I got the picture of software industry totally wrong and somebody can see differently.

One contrary view might be that building software is a extremely high risk investment, so the guys who fail IT projects are compensated by the guys who succeed, very much like what happens in biotech research. But I don't think this argument holds water very well. Anyways, I wait for others to come up with bright new ideas; I feel I'm useless on this subject ( I don't see any better).

I posted a page that encouraged people to post political speculation on their home pages. The following comments convinced me that we weren't ready for that yet so I removed it. Sorry. -- WardCunningham

Yes, I am aware that [the RunForPresident?] page was made by WardCunningham. Of course he gets to decide what is OnTopic. Apparently he has decided to move the goalposts and make this a Wiki about PeopleProjectsPatternsAndPolitics? instead of just PeopleProjectsAndPatterns. That's fine, but that's not why I'm here. After all the recent chaos, I suspect I'm not the only Wikizen who will be alienated by this sudden shift. I get enough political bullshit from the daily news; I don't need or want more from Wiki. --AnonymousGnome?

How, may I ask, are additional realms of inquiry on this Wiki a cause for alienation? To QuickChangesJunkies?, maybe, but otherwise you'd never know that your wiki was being touched (ironic inflection on 'your'). If 40,000 pages on Guatemalan farming were added, how would that affect the subjects that interest you most? Maybe that topic would be irrelevant to human life, but politics certainly isn't. And how is it that we learn patterns anyway, if not from the wider world? --ChristopherGaltenberg

This argument has been done to death many times over. Please don't start it again. OffTopic is OffTopic. Drop it.

I think there has been misuse of the WardCunningham signature by another person. A person who is interested to stir up conflict on the wiki, or wants to make a point that UserName can easily be faked I think there is a way to check the ip of the person using a particular UserName, please do that and confirm whether it is indeed real enough. --dl

Before RecentPosts, Ward at least had plausible denial that it wasn't him, but alas, that is no longer the case.

Did it ever occur to you guys that Ward was kidding? You think he's seriously running for president? You think his little joke means that his wiki is suddenly going to be about "political bullshit"? Incredible. Give the man a break.

So this is the real Ward who posted then? Maybe he is now into psychology research, like some on Meatball, and wanted to see reactions from the different people.

It was indeed the real Ward, but I don't think a complex theory is needed, he was probably just following an idle train of thought for a few minutes over the weekend.

Most of the people I know have joked about running for president at one time or another, there's nothing odd about this.

It puts one in a different mental context to think about what policies you'd endorse in such a position, like saying, "If I were king of the world..." leads to different statements than just reading the newspaper and then saying "I wish congress would..."

I think it is a great exercise to reflect on what changes we want for a country, for the world. Writing a political platform is a great idea! Anything that makes us think is good! I did my political program anyway whether Ward was joking or not. I am sure my platform is better than Dean's or whoever is running for the democrats! (in all modesty!). Heck if anyone wants to use my ideas, they are in the public domain so feel free to use them!

How would this be different from any Republican President? Making the top 1% of the constituency richer while the majority languishes in (relative) poverty has been done. (RewordFlamebaitPlease)

Is that really flamebait? I can't dispute it's truth.