“I really should have checked the x-ray better before I extracted your front tooth. But you know, I’m not sorry. It was an external constraint — there was a queue of patients waiting”.
I can’t believe how low we let this profession sink. I hope in 15 years we will look at thies era like we look at the Wild West today. Exciting from a distance but nobody would really like to live like that.
Like on that dentist's case, my hope is that as liability persecutions and lawsuits due to faulty software increase, that will eventually be sorted out.
I believe we need to get the "context" before judging any situation.
Building software should be an engineering discipline with all its perks and responsibilities just like building bridges. We rarely see it and it propagates to the craftsmen who seriously believe that good quality software is impossible to write under the slightest of constraints. Like business pressure.
We had this ability in the past when programming was way more difficult, tedious and error prone. Look what IBM did with their “Clean Room” approach. I’m sure we still have it at many places but we choose to spread the myth that it cannot be done. This call to stop apologizing is the next step towards not even trying.
I think everyone would not deny this fact. Engineering is more of a discipline.
But if you see things practically, this issue of "bad" code may not happen for various number of cases. For example, unclear project requirements, use cases etc., That is where 'context' of what happened helps to better understand the situation.
Building bridges are not done agile and it has a learnings from decades or even centuries. Computer Engineering is mostly agile where you push changes based on changing requirements.