Why companies struggle with recalcitrant IT

为什么企业要与顽抗的IT抗争呢

词汇

Recalcitrant/反抗的；反对的；顽强的

As software eats the world, more firms are being nibbled at by their computer systems

随着软件蚕食世界，越来越多的公司正被自己的计算机系统蚕食

Jul 18th 2020 |

IT IS SUPPOSED to be the “Tesla killer”. Volkswagen’s new ID.3 is the firm’s first mass-produced all-electric car—and the first step in the German carmaker’s attempts to reinvent itself for an electrified world. That makes it perhaps the most important model since the original Golf, launched in 1976. The ID.3 is also late. Mechanically, the car is hunky-dory. But some software widgets that are a big selling point these days—rumoured to include smartphone connectivity and augmented-reality parking assistance—may be missing at first, only to be added later. Originally set for this summer, the launch has been pushed back until at least September.

它被认为是“特斯拉杀手”。大众新id3是该公司第一款大规模生产的全电动汽车，也是这家德国汽车制造商试图为电气化世界重塑自身的第一步。这或许是自1976年推出首款高尔夫以来最重要的车型。id3也迟到了。从机械上来说，这辆车很好。但是一些软件小部件，这些天是一个大的卖点，传言包括智能手机连接和增强的现实停车辅助功能，可能一开始会缺失，后来才会添加。最初计划在今年夏天推出，现在已经推迟到至少9月份。

词汇

hunky-dory /了不起的；极好的；最高的

widget/装饰物；小机械

rumour/传闻；谣言

VW is not the only big company struggling to make its computers work. Last year British banks were hauled over the coals by regulators for online outages and botched IT upgrades that left millions of customers unable to make or receive payments. Some problems are much more serious. Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft were grounded in 2019 after two fatal crashes caused partly by a software flaw. Investigators have since found lesser bugs. Airlines are, for instance, now advised to turn the plane off and on again every 51 days, to stop its computers displaying false data in mid-flight. A similar problem found in 2017 in some aeroplanes made by Airbus, Boeing’s European rival, prompted the European Union Aviation Safety Agency to require that such aircraft be rebooted at least every 149 hours.

大众并不是唯一一家在电脑工作方面举步维艰的大公司。去年，英国的银行因网络中断和糟糕的IT升级而受到监管机构的严厉批评，导致数百万客户无法支付或接受付款。有些问题要严重得多。在部分由于软件缺陷导致的两起致命事故后，波音737 MAX飞机于2019年停飞。调查人员后来发现了较小的故障。例如，航空公司现在被建议每51天停飞，以防止其电脑在飞行途中显示虚假数据。2017年，波音的欧洲竞争对手空客(Airbus)生产的一些飞机也出现了类似的问题，促使欧盟航空安全局(European Union Aviation Safety Agency)要求此类飞机至少每149小时重启一次。

词汇

Botch/糟蹋；拙笨地修补

 

Blame for companies’ IT woes often ends up in the boardroom. Sometimes that is fair; Dennis Muilenberg was rightly forced to resign as Boeing’s CEO after the tragic 737 max disasters. But not always. For software is hard—and hard to keep up with. And the employees expected to produce it are often the products of a discipline that is in many ways oddly premodern. When software is “eating the world”—Silicon Valley speak for a situation where most firms are to a greater or lesser extent software companies—that matters.

对公司IT困境的指责最终往往落到董事会的头上。有时这是公平的;波音737 max悲剧发生后，丹尼斯·梅伦伯格（Dennis Muilenberg）被迫辞去首席执行官一职，这是正确的。但并非总是如此。因为软件是很难的，很难跟上。而员工们想要开发出的软件往往是一门包含了现代化前各种奇怪知识的学科。当软件正在“吞噬世界”时，硅谷面临着绝大多数公司都或多或少是软件公司的情况——而这很重要。

词汇

Premodern/现代化之前

Start with the computer code itself. Programming requires a mix of hyper-literalness and creativity. Tiny errors, like a misplaced punctuation mark, can completely change how a system behaves. An industry rule of thumb is that, depending on how carefully they work, programmers make between 0.5 and 50 errors in every 1,000 lines of code they write. Because cars and aircraft contain tens of millions of lines, the chances of an error-free system are in effect zero. Even when bugs do not lead to catastrophe, they put a constant drag on a firm’s productivity. A survey commissioned by Stripe, a digital-payments processor, suggested the average developer spends 21 hours a week fixing old or bad code.

从计算机代码本身开始。编程需要超字面性和创造性的结合。微小的错误，比如错误的标点符号，可以完全改变系统的行为方式。行业的经验法则是，根据工作的仔细程度，程序员在每1000行代码中会犯0.5到50个错误。由于汽车和飞机包含数以千万计的线路，系统无差错的可能性实际上为零。即使bug没有导致严重问题，它们也会持续拖累公司的生产力。数字支付处理器Stripe委托进行的一项调查显示，开发者平均每周花21个小时来修复旧代码或坏代码。

词汇

hyper/超过；亢奋

in effect/实际上

catastrophe/大灾难；大祸

  

The inherent difficulty of programming is made worse by the shortcomings of software engineering as a profession. These are laid out in a book, “The Problem With Software: Why Smart Engineers Write Bad Code”. The author, Adam Barr, spent 20 years as a developer for Microsoft, a software giant. Many coders, he notes, are at least partly self-taught. That leads to bad habits, which software-engineering courses fail to correct. There is too little communication between academia and industry, and no real agreement on what to teach or what habits to instil. The result, argues Mr Barr, is a field in which folklore and fads too often take the place of professional standards.

软件工程作为一种职业的缺陷使编程固有的困难变得更糟。这些在《软件的问题:为什么聪明的工程师写出糟糕的代码》一书中被列出。作者亚当·巴尔(Adam Barr)在软件巨头微软(Microsoft)做了20年的开发人员。他指出，许多程序员至少有一部分是自学的。这导致了软件工程课程无法纠正的坏习惯。学术界和产业界之间的交流太少，在该教什么或灌输什么习惯方面也没有真正的共识。巴尔认为，其结果是，在这个领域里，民俗和流行的喜好过于频繁地取代了专业标准。

词汇

Folklore/民间传说；民间文学；民俗

Fad/时尚；一时的爱好

To illustrate the field’s shaky foundations, Mr Barr points to the practice, popular with technology firms like Google or Apple, of giving job candidates a programming problem to solve on a whiteboard. Few other fields behave that way, because they assume that, by dint of having graduated, applicants have already achieved a basic level of competence. Doctors do not expect anatomy quizzes before being hired. Mechanical engineers are not required to jot down Newton’s laws of motion to prove their bona fides.

为了说明这一领域不稳固的基础，巴尔指出了在谷歌或苹果等科技公司中很流行的做法，即让求职者在白板上解决一个编程问题。很少有其他领域有这样的表现，因为他们认为，通过毕业所经历的磨砺，申请者已经达到了基本的能力水平。医生在被雇佣前不会要求做解剖学的测验。机械工程师不需要记下牛顿的运动定律来证明他们的真实性。

词汇

Dint/凹痕

Anatomy/解剖；解刨学

bona fide/ 善意的；真实的；真诚的

 

 

All those problems are compounded by software engineering’s breathless rate of change. Even when a system works, it rapidly becomes obsolete. The woes of British banks are largely the result of trying to maintain such “legacy” systems, written by long-departed programmers (often outsourced) in half-forgotten computer languages to satisfy criteria no one can quite remember. Coders under pressure to add nifty new features often cut corners, storing up problems for the (ever less distant) future.

软件工程惊人的变化速度使所有这些问题变得更加复杂。即使当一个系统运转时，它也很快就会过时。英国银行的困境在很大程度上是试图维护这些“遗留”系统的结果，这些系统是由长期离职的程序员(通常是外包的)用几乎被遗忘的计算机语言编写的，以满足没有人记得很清楚的标准。在增加漂亮的新特性的压力下，编码人员常常走捷径，为(更遥远的)未来存储问题。

词汇

Nifty/俏皮的；漂亮的

The result, says one expert with decades of experience, is that shiny new IT systems can rapidly devolve into rickety, half-understood contraptions held together with gaffer tape and a prayer. Eventually the costs become too great to ignore, and companies must upgrade their systems. But that is the moment of maximum danger, for the new software must do everything that the half-understood old one does, and more. It is, to repeat a common but apposite analogy, like rebuilding an aircraft in flight.

一位有几十年经验的专家说，其结果是，崭新的IT系统可能会迅速退化为快散架的、看似能读懂又读不懂的的奇怪的玩意，这些玩意只是用胶带和祈祷粘在一起而已。最终，成本变得不可忽视，公司必须升级他们的系统。但这是最危险的时刻，因为新软件必须完成那些尚不完全了解的旧软件所做的一切，甚至更多。重复一个常见但贴切的类比，就像重建一架飞行中的飞机。

词汇

Rickety/摇晃的；虚弱的；要散架的

Contraption/奇妙的装置；精巧的设计

Gaffer/领班；乡下老头；老人

A bug’s life

一个小故障的一生

VW is doing its best to iron out the kinks with the ID.3’s snazzy features. The firm wants to bring most software development back in-house, and has spent €7bn ($8bn) on a shiny new “digital unit”. That is probably a good idea. However, as Mr Barr argues, the structural problems with writing software mean that spending money on it does not, by itself, guarantee success. One great advantage possessed by startups like Tesla or Monzo, a newish online bank in Britain, is that their programmers are handed a blank sheet of paper. With no legacy systems to maintain, and fewer old bugs to root out, their software is more robust and developers can spend more time on features that customers want.

大众正在尽最大努力解决id3的新潮功能的问题。该公司希望将大部分软件开发工作带回公司内部，并已斥资70亿欧元(80亿美元)收购了一个崭新的“数字部门”。那可能是个好主意。然而，正如巴尔所指出的那样，软件编写的结构性问题意味着，仅仅在上面花钱并不能保证成功。像特斯拉(Tesla)和Monzo(英国一家新兴的网上银行)这样的初创公司拥有的一个巨大优势是，他们的程序员拿到的是一张白纸。由于没有需要维护的遗留系统，而且需要根除的旧故障更少，他们的软件更加稳健，开发人员可以花更多的时间在客户想要的特性上。

If that is cold comfort for older companies that have no easy way of starting afresh, computing greybeards offer reassurance—after a fashion. The startups’ advantages will, they predict, prove temporary. Bugs will creep in. Bodge jobs will go unfixed. Developers will leave, taking knowledge with them. Today’s feisty usurpers will become tomorrow’s clumsy incumbents, held back by their antiquated, unreliable IT—and ripe for disruption in turn. ■

如果这对于那些没有简单方法重新开始的老公司来说是一种冷冰冰的安慰，那么计算机行业的老前辈们可以提供些许安慰。他们预测，这些初创公司的优势将是暂时的。故障总会一点点出现。工作差错将不固定。开发人员会带着他们的知识离开。今天争强好胜的篡位者将会成为明天笨拙的在位者，他们被陈旧、不可靠的企业所束缚——而颠覆的时机已经成熟。

词汇

Afresh/重新；再度

Greybeard/老人

after a fashion/勉强；不太好

Bodge/混乱；差错

Usurper/ 篡位者；篡夺者