Originally Posted by
deSitter
syseng68k gave us a nice lecture on some IT stuff. Having spent of lot of time trying to make money in the IT world (there being no honorable way to make it in physics), I should point out the other side - IT abstractions always fail, most IT projects fail, period: on a team of 10 programmers, 1 is productive, 2 are helpful, 4 are a waste of office chairs, and 3 are probably faking it. and have a resume full of "exaggerations". No single discipline (such as it is) has generated so much hot air. The current programming idioms are byzantine beyond description, and have morphed eventually into "ends in themselves". Every problem of any sort is bent around the idiom, and bad performing bloatware is tolerated because "you can always throw more hardware at it". There are more IT fads than Paris fashions. Keep that in mind when you imagine a computer confusing your crew in a critical situation.
Gosh - so none of the failed IT projects are anything to do with poorly defined user requirements and feature creep? In 30 years as an IT professional those are what I've found to be the biggest problem, along with salesmen more concerned about their bonus than anything else.