I understand what you’re trying yo day, but my family ran a construction company for generations (until my father retired) and they had contingencies for every adverse scenario to stay on schedule: Generators, battery-operated tools, hand-operated tools, heaters for pretty much anything you can think of for extreme cold, wind coverings, etc. I don’t remember them ever stopping work except for a trade union strike.

I’m pretty sure doctors don’t abandon their patients during a blackout either, or even a war for that matter.

Mature professions have procedures and backup procedures for pretty much every non-catastrophic situation.

▲ JsonDemWitOster a day ago | parent | next [-]

Which begs the question is Software Eng'g/Development a mature profession? We've certainly been trying to especially in the last decade, arguably incentivized by ZIRP and VC money but the last few years?

I'm not just talking about tools either. You mentioned redundancies and contingency plans. Layoffs have stripped workforces to barebones headcounts. How can you have redundancy when one sick man-day reduces your eng'g team by 50%?

	▲	thesz a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		`> Which begs the question is Software Eng'g/Development a mature profession?` I think that correct question is "does use of external LLMs and agentic coding make Software Engineering less mature profession?" For every sense of the word pair "less mature," including, but not limited to, "less responsible for consequences of actions."
	▲	qrux a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No, it's not.

▲ LouisSayers a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Generators, battery-operated tools, hand-operated tools, heaters

The equivalent for a dev is laptop, another AI, mobile hotspot and work at a cafe/library.

Microsoft being down is like having a contingency for a tornado.

	▲	12_throw_away 18 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Microsoft being down is like having a contingency for a tornado. I'm probably misreading your point, so, apologies, but I'd still just like to say: Microsoft is a profit-driven, human-run corporation that mostly offers business infrastructure services. I think contingency planning for Microsoft service failures is almost entirely unlike contingency planning for adverse weather events?
	▲	svieira a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> having a contingency for a tornado. Sounds like a normal thing to do if you live in Kansas. And perhaps we are all about to start living in the software equivalent of Kansas?

▲ dematz a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, I believe US hospitals are legally required to maintain and test backup generators in case power goes out.

Of course proof by analogy is silly anyways, my email going down is not nearly as bad as a patient's medical equipment going down.

	▲	officeplant a day ago \| parent [-]
		>Yes, I believe US hospitals are legally required to maintain and test backup generators in case power goes out. And even that only does so much, it was 45 years ago but my Grandmother had a stroke on the operating table because the power went out and generators didn't kick on until someone could run and manually start them because the autostart failed.