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Software Development's Evolution towards Product Design
An anonymous reader writes: "The Lost Garden site has an excellent post on software development's evolution into product design. He starts with the first attempts at software design (for yourself or a colleague), and brings the conversation forward to modern design settings." From the article: "At the dawn of software history, programmers wrote software for other programmers. This was a golden era. Life was so simple. The programmers understood their own technical needs quite intimately and were able to produce software that served those needs. The act of software development was a closed circuit. A programmer could sit in a corner and write code that he wanted. By default it also happened to apply to other programmers."
Why is capitalism (well, excluding public schools) so slow to punish idiocy? In every place I've worked, I've seen these inefficiencies from lack of communication, etc. I assumed, apparently incorrectly, that a company that behaved sanely would easily trounce such mismanaged competition. Is the mismanagement actually good management? Or is it simply impossible to have a company free of gross stupidity? The school system is a different and more depressing situation because there is little chance of competition. My mother and friends work in public schools and have many horror stories about administration mandating the latest and greatest "programs".