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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24828 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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Another part is that merely having a regulatory framework transforms your industry from "building cool stuff" to "checking regulatory boxes and making sure all the regulation-following is documented" [...] They didn't get into the field to sit in meetings where you discuss whether the SSDD paragraph 2.0.2.50 is properly related to the SDD paragraph 3.1.2, the ICD paragraph 4.1.2.5, and the STP paragraph 6.6.6, which lines of code implement SDD paragraph 3.1.2, and to make sure the SIP properly specifies the update procedures

Is this the bitter voice of experience of someone who has worked on software for the financial industry?

and drives the sort of people who do innovative work out of the field

In my experience, companies that operate in compliance-heavy industries that also have hard technical challenges frequently are able to retain talented developers who hate that kind of thing, either by outsourcing to Compliance-As-A-Service companies (Stripe, Avalara, Workday, DocuSign, etc) or by paying somewhat larger amounts of money to developers who are willing to do boring line-of-business stuff (hi). Though at some point most of your work becomes compliance, so if you don't have enough easily compartmentalized difficult technical problems the "offload the compliance crap" strategy stops working. I know some brilliant people work at Waymo, which has a quite high compliance burden but also some incredibly crunchy technical problems. On the flip side, I can't imagine that e.g. ADP employs many of our generation's most brilliant programmers.

Is this the bitter voice of experience of someone who has worked on software for the financial industry?

Not financial, but the meetings and the acronyms (though not the specific paragraph numbers) are real.

In my experience, companies that operate in compliance-heavy industries that also have hard technical challenges frequently are able to retain talented developers who hate that kind of thing, either by outsourcing to Compliance-As-A-Service companies (Stripe, Avalara, Workday, DocuSign, etc) or by paying somewhat larger amounts of money to developers who are willing to do boring line-of-business stuff (hi).

This works when the regulations target parts of the product that can be isolated from the technical challenges, but not (as in e.g. aircraft) when they can't. But I can understand the bitter envy towards software people of someone who is in a field where a good year means finding that you can tweak the radius of the trailing edge of the winglet by 1mm and save an average of a pound of fuel in an Atlantic crossing and only have to go through an abbreviated aerodynamic design review.

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