I feel like this says something weird/rotten about the state of modern enterprise software and the modern financial industry, but I'm not exactly sure what to make of it yet: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-can-t-have-its-900-million-back Relevant quotes for people who don't enjoy obscure American financial news (though Matt Levine's writing style is amazing, and I highly recommend reading the whole thing if you have the time and interest.)

"...this whole setup is a “technical error.” Citi’s software will only let you pay principal to some lenders if you pretend to pay it to every lender, and it will only let you pretend to pay principal to every lender if you check the “just pretend” box next to “PRINCIPAL” (fine!) and “FUND” (what?) and “FRONT” (what even?). What a terrifying thing."

followed by:

"Yesterday the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Morningstar Credit Ratings LLC ... another software-design horror story, though of an opposite kind....

Morningstar’s problem is that it put a highly regulated model in a regular old Excel spreadsheet where analysts could type whatever they wanted, and did."

If anything, this shows that software really is a people problem... No amount of beautiful code can fix bad social structure 😛

The last phrase made me think of Conway's law, which establishes a connection between (in this case) code structure and the social structure behind its development and maintenance. Which makes me wonder if insisting on some to-be-specified beauty criterion for software could actually fix bad social structures, at least on a small scale.

I definitely agree with the connection to Conway's law. I think this shows how software acts as a "multiplier" for existing social structure. This brings up this taxonomic idea of "additive" vs. "multiplicative" technology... What makes a technology one or the other?