Don't Shoot Me, I'm Only the Software

ctwxman writes "How often have you heard about some massive crash and then the blame was placed on the software? "Disasters are often blamed on bad software, but the cause is rarely bad programming." If you've been looking to blame your boss, this article from MSNBC says your ship has come in! Poor planning, poor execution and poor leadership are more likely to blame than bad code when it comes to systems that fail. "

Irony

[Egonis]

How ironic that MSN(BC) is pushing a story about 'don't blame the programming'.

Although legitimate in the concept, I would say that poor programming is most definitely a cause for system failures.

Yikes...

[Ionizer7]

This is a double whammy for Billy Gates, it's his software and he is the boss.

MSNBC says your ship has come in!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, a bug in the ship's navigation software caused the ship to overshoot the dock, killing all programmers waiting for the cruise.

So this bluescreen of death...

[salvorHardin]

...isn't actually the fault of MS programmers? In that case, given that leadership is one of the factors, then I can legitimately blame Bill Gates personally. So that's alright, then.

Re:Irony

[truthsearch]

...but even good programmers aren't miracle workers.

"Damn it Bill, I'm a programmer, not a miracle worker!"

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Re:And the net/net is...A N D

[mr_z_beeblebrox]

IT budgets are still shrinking....

We need to hire MORE managers.

I hate smoking software problems

[magarity]

Last week, my WinXP box locked up in the middle of a game. It was so bad, smoke poured out of the case. The software, probably WinXP but maybe the game, had overused one of the RAM modules so hard that two of the leads were charred black.

%^$#@& SOFTWARE!!!!

UI and errors

[Southpaw018]

I've always wanted to design a system that gets nastier every time a user repeats an error.
In the generic sense, it would start with "Could not do xyz. Please check what you intended to do and try again."
Then, it would progress through "I can't do that. Try again." "You're starting to wear on my nerves. Can't you do anything right?"
Then, it would start to get more down to the source of the problem, beginning with "DOES NOT COMPUTE" and ending, finally, with "You fucking moron, my program works, read the manual before i cut you."
Stupid users always bothering me with [rottentomatoes.com] crap [rottentomatoes.com].

Re:Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

The typical deadline for open source software is "when it's ready"

Except for open source projects like... Fedora and Mandrake with their "Sure it erases NTFS partitions, but we'll release it anyway" distributions.

Re:MS employees

[eam]

At MicroSoft.

Re:Irony

[horrens]

what a wonderful world it would be without clients
but unfortunately they are with the money