✅ The problem with software

I'm currently reading The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. Gawande is a surgeon who wants to find a way to reduce the mistakes and their catastrophic consequences during surgery. So he investigates other industries such as air travel and the construction of large buildings. What he finds is the checklist is at the center of their processes. (more on this later ...)

With software, our failures (with some exceptions) are usually not as catastrophic as people dying in surgery, airplanes falling out of the sky, and large buildings collapsing. Another difference with software is that is easy and cheap to fix by deploying an update (hence the prefix "soft"). People, airplanes, and buildings are not this way.

Thus we can get sloppy. Motivation to "get it right" can wane as pressure to ship increases and we can "always fix it later." The problem is that this approach encourages accumulating technical debt. Technical debt will just as surely crush the soul of a programmer and eventually the company, just not in dramatic news-catching ways.

Building a sustainable technology company requires an extreme level of discipline because there is no external force requiring you to do it right. For many technology industries, there is not any regulatory agency watching over them -- it is entirely up to YOU, and that is where YOUR Platform comes in.