This thread on Hacker News terrifies me

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)]

On 09/01/2018 05:06 PM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> 
> If you have a specific context (like banking) then you can develop a 
> software method that specifies how to build banking software, and repeat 
> it, assuming that the banks you develop the method for are similar
> 
> Of course, banking has changed quite a lot over the past 15 years 
> (online + mobile). Software often operates in contexts that are 
> critically different and that change in somewhat unpredictable manners.
> 

Speaking of, that always really gets me:

The average ATM is 24/7. Sure, there may be some downtime, but what, how 
much? For the most part, these things were more or less reliable decades 
ago, from a time with *considerably* less of the "best practices" and 
accumulated experience, know-how, and tooling we have today. And over 
the years, they still don't seem to have screwed ATMs up too badly.

But contrast that to my bank's phone "app": This thing *is* rooted 
firmly in modern technology, modern experience, modern collective 
knowledge, modern hardware and...The servers it relies on *regularly* go 
down for several hours at a time during the night. That's been going on 
for the entire 2.5 years I've been using it.

And for about an hour the other day, despite using the latest update, 
most of the the buttons on the main page were *completely* unresponsive. 
Zero acknowledgement of presses whatsoever. But I could tell the app 
wasn't frozen: The custom-designed text entry boxes still handled focus 
events just fine.

Tech from 1970's: Still working fine. Tech from 2010's: Pfffbbttt!!!

Clearly something's gone horribly, horribly wrong with modern software 
development.