What is the biggest IT myth of all time?
Colin Beveridge asks over at the BCS group on LinkedIn asks: "What is the biggest IT myth of all time?"
Well I don’t know about the biggest, but I have certainly heard some corkers in my time. Here are a few that have stuck with me.
A canny programmer once stole millions of pounds from a bank by taking advantage of rounding errors to "create" money
This might have some credibility in the various "salami slicing" scams that have been pulled over the years, but the version I heard, where the programmer continually lived off a couple of nefarious lines of code - long after he had left the bank - as his secret account continued to accumulate fractional cents every day, is almost certainly a myth. But, if you like this kind of thing, you could do worse than check out Clifford Stoll’s account of how his investigation of a 75 cent accounting error lead to one of the first documented hacking attacks and captures.
"Just [insert worst practice here] to keep the client happy, we’ll do it properly later"
This is very closely related to anything prefixed with "temporary". It’ll never get done properly, it will always be like that and you’ll have to live with it for far far longer than it would have taken to do it correctly, and it will also cause you far more pain and grief than you would have endured shipping a little late in the first place.
"It is finished"
IT, software and systems are processes not furniture. It’s never finished. Unless it’s written in COBOL, talking via CICS and running on an zSeries née S/390 - and your pockets are very very deep - in which case yes, your software has reached Nirvana and will live forever. Your developers, however, may not ;)
