1 Coding Is Stupid

“How I Learned to Stop Worrying, and Love Software Engineering.”

This is a concise guide to navigating painful truths to achieve elegant software.

While my career managing software engineers benefitted greatly from them, this book will not attempt to cover topics from Extreme Programming Explained or The Dragon Book (Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools).

I have heard that 19 out of 20 software projects fail, by any reasonable success critera. My own experience suggests that this statistic may honestly be generous. Software automation updates are frequently buggy, late, and all-together too expensive.

When I first heard the 19/20 statistic, I assumed this meant that any given team, on any given project, faced 95% odds of failure.

But I put to you this awful insight:

On any given project, 19 out of 20 software teams face around 99.9% odds of failure.
On any given project, 1 out of 20 software teams face around 99.9% odds of success.

The composition and management of the team is by far the leading predictor of software automation success.

If your developer team, in all honesty, delivers consistent reliable bug free solutions before they are needed - then this book may not be for you.

Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross is pretty great.

But if your team matches the industry status quo: If they are stressed, overworked, over budget, and often produce buggy outputs much too late - then by all means, keep reading.