This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Saturday, 1 September 2018 at 05:51:10 UTC, rikki cattermole 
wrote:
> Then there are polytechnics which I went to for my degree, 
> where the focus was squarely on Industry and not on academia at 
> all.

But the teaching is based on research in a good engineering 
school...

> But in saying that, we had third year students starting out not 
> understanding how cli arguments work so...
>
> Proper software engineering really takes 5+ years just to get 
> started, 10+ to become actually good at it. Sadly that won't be 
> acceptable in our current society.

The root cause of bad software is that many programmers don't 
even have an education in CS or software engineering, or didn't 
do a good job while getting it!

Another problem is that departments get funding based on how many 
students they have and many students are not fit to be 
programmers. Then you have the recruitment process and people in 
management without a proper theoretical understanding of the 
topic looking for "practical programmers" (must have experience 
with framework X) which basically means that they get programmers 
with low theoretical understanding and therefore fail to build an 
environment where people can learn... So building a good team 
where people can become experts (based on actual research) is 
mostly not happening. It becomes experience based and the 
experience is that it isn't broken if customers are willing to 
pay.

Basic capitalism. Happens outside programming too. Make 
good-looking shit that breaks after the warranty is void.

Anyway, Software Engineering most certainly is a research 
discipline separate from CS and there is research and theory for 
developing software at different cost levels.

Games are not bug free because that would be extremely expensive, 
and cause massive delays in shipping which makes it impossible to 
plan marketing. Games are less buggy when they reuse existing 
frameworks, but that makes for less exciting designs.