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Comment by rhacker | Hacker News Reader

It's like building a house. Should I have the HVAC guy do the drywall and the drywall guy do the HVAC? Clearly software engineering isn't the same as building a house, but if you have an expert in JAX-WS/SOAP and a feature need to connect to some legacy soap healthcare system... have him do that, and let the guy that knows how to write an MPI write the MPI.

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At the risk of falling down an analogy rabbit hole, I'll be upset if the HVAC guy assumes that air will flow freely throughout the house and has no understanding of walls, or if the drywall guy blindly screws into my air ducts. No abstraction is perfect; some knowledge of the other layers is necessary to do a proper job. Unfortunately, in software, it seems like our abstractions are particularly leaky, and knowledge of other layers is frequently necessary to do a proper job. In house building, issues are usually contained by physical proximity, whereas the same is obviously not true in software, particularly networked software.

the hvac guy does not know how drywall is made and would struggle to produce a piece od drywall. As a matter of fact, the drywall guy would struggle. They don’t build their own materials, they use materials they buy from Home Depot.

This isn't a bad analogy. Like modern houses, software has gotten large, specific, and more complex in the last 30 some odd years.

Some argue it's unnecessary complexity, but I don't think that's correct. Even individuals want more than a basic geo cities website. Businesses want uptime, security, flashy, etc... in order to stand out.

I've been (unfortunately) in a few houses refurbishing by now and the good workers are the ones that also know a bit about other domains in house refurbishing. The HVAC guy will know about wiring and the good dry wall guy will know a bit of the layman job as well. They don't necessarily have to, but the good ones will.

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