> I’ve checked a few other papers and think I’m tentatively confident in this line of reasoning: certain bugs take more time to fix (and cause more damage) than others, and said bugs tend to be issues in the design. I haven’t vetted these papers to see if they don’t make major mistakes, though. It’s more time-consuming to do that when you’re trying to synthesize an stance based on lots of indirect pieces of evidence. You’re using a lot more papers but doing a lot less with each one, so the cost gets higher.

Empiricism and quantitative metrics have indispensable value, that much should be clear to everybody I hope. But too often people forget (or have active contempt for) the value of qualitative metrics which can only be judged subjectively. Such considerations are naturally harder to deal with than cold hard data, so it doesn't surprise me that people want to avoid it. But when you blind yourself to the qualitative and subjective, you do yourself a huge disservice. Just ask McNamara; he thought he could win the Vietnam War with quantitative metrics and utterly neglected difficult to quantify metrics like public sentiment, both in Vietnam and America. I see echos of this in our industry today; we love to talk about empirical measures like the number of bugs, but subjective metrics, like the severity of those bugs, receive less attention.

Many university programs are set up to address this, by making engineering students earn credits in the humanities as well. But I fear the value of this is often inadequately explained. Contempt for the humanities and scientism go hand-in-hand, and are a worrying trend particularly in the tech industry.