> "Wait 8 months and your car will start working again" has never been an acceptable answer for the mechanical side
The same side that routinely totals the entire car for minor fender benders? Yeah, all software would be great if we could just tell our clients to fuck off whenever they bring in some garbage for us to fix! You want a fixed car? Go buy a new one lol!
But we don't have that privilege, so this is what happens.
> The same side that routinely totals the entire car for minor fender benders?
Which side is that? Insurance companies total out cars based on repair value exceeding the car’s value. If you want to fork out your own cash, nobody is going to refuse to fix it.
Right, that's how insurance companies do it because it makes sense. Have you ever heard of software systems routinely being "totaled"? And yet the expectation is for the software to be more reliable than the hardware despite years and years of tech debt.
A couple of years ago I was a tech lead on a project that “totaled” a 30 year old, perfectly functional application and migrated it to a big cloud solution.
Remember during COVID hearing about state unemployment systems running on obsolete mainframes? The dirty little secret there is that many states use a semi-standardized solution developed by IBM in the 80s (when the Feds spent a bunch of money to computerize unemployment insurance). The mainframe stuff is solid, the garbage bolted to it for IVR and web support 20 years ago is not. Because of that poor stewardship, the Federal government will probably spend billions over the next decade totalling those systems.
In both of your examples the existing projects were 30-40 years old...there are 2022 model cars getting totaled right now. It's not comparable. How many 40 year old cars do you see getting totaled?
The same side that routinely totals the entire car for minor fender benders? Yeah, all software would be great if we could just tell our clients to fuck off whenever they bring in some garbage for us to fix! You want a fixed car? Go buy a new one lol!
But we don't have that privilege, so this is what happens.