The Problem With Software: Why Smart Engineers Write Bad Code (The MIT Press)

by Adam Barr

There was a team in Microsoft Research that examined software engineering, generally using Microsoft as its population of interest, but the results, although considered to be thought-provoking tidbits, rarely had any uptake back in the product groups. It was a variation of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, where people realize that news stories about their areas of expertise are simplistic or inaccurate, but completely trust news stories about topics they know nothing about. If you told members of one Microsoft team about the engineering experience of another team, they would immediately be able to identify—because of their knowledge of the internals of Microsoft—the ways in which that other team was different from their team, and therefore dismiss the guidance as not relevant.