Comfort for Application Developers from Tom de Marco

Thanks to a tweet from @flowchainsensei, I've just been enjoying an excellent article by Tom de Marco. It's well worth a read; I took away two key thoughts.

1. Developing software is much harder than developing hardware
2. Software developers spend much of their life feeling bad about late delivery when it's usually not their fault.

To put his core conclusion another way, most software projects are a waste of effort. They have such low marginal utility that they are doomed never to show a return for the organisation that funds them. If we just didn't do them the world would be better off.

Of course, we'd need to find work for the ex-developers.  Maybe they could learn to teach. We could certainly use a few more skilled IT teachers.