No kidding. I was adjacent to a tape out w some last minute tweaks - ugh. The problem is the current cycle time is very slow and costly and u spend as much time validating things as you do designing. It’s not programming.
Once interviewed at a place which made sensors that was used a lot in the oil industry. Once you put a sensor on the bottom of the ocean 100+ meters (300+ feet) down, they're not getting serviced any time soon.
They showed me the facilities, and the vast majority was taken up by testing and validation rigs. The sensors would go through many stages, taking several weeks.
The final stage had an adjacent room with a viewing window and a nice couch, so a representative for the client could watch the final tests before bringing the sensors back.
Quite the opposite to the "just publish a patch" mentality that's so prevalent these days.
If you work on a critical piece of software (especially one you can't update later), you absolutely can spend way more time validating than you do writing code.
The ease of pushing updates encourages lazy coding.
> The ease of pushing updates encourages lazy coding.
Certainly in some cases, but in others, it just shifts the economics: Obviously, fault tolerance can be laborious and time consuming, and that time and labor is taken from something else. When the natures of your dev and distribution pipelines render faults less disruptive, and you have a good foundational codebase and code review process that pay attention to security and core stability, quickly creating 3 working features can be much, much more valuable than making sure 1 working feature will never ever generate a support ticket.
Even for software it’s often risky to remove code once it’s in there. Lots of software products are shipped with tons of unused code and assets because no one’s got time to validate nothing’s gonna go wrong when you remove them. Check out some game teardowns, they often have dead assets from years ago, sometimes even completely unrelated things from the studio’s past projects.
