The Unbearable Stupidity of Social Sciences

Maschinenhaus

October 6, 2023 10:15 AM

TL;DL: This talk attempts to explain how the software industry is reinventing the weel every year while constantly ignoring what the social sciences discovered hundreds of years ago.--This talk may be satire - or a rant, depending on the attitude of the listener.Maybe, just maybe, it is a little enlightening.In the software industry we have Conway's Law, we have Domain Driven Design, we have agile software development, we have microservices, we have team topologies...A lot of these concepts seem to be brand new, complex challenges for organizations.People spent hours upon hours thinking about the change required to implement the restructuring of organizations that is necessary for the digitization of the world.But with a little distance, from the perspective of sociology, organizational psychology, or cultural sciences a big question mark arizes: Why the heck doesn't the software industry just ask people who know about these subjects?I want to make some hypotheses about why the software industry falls into such strong biases about the novelty of what it creates.Together, we will look into the history of social sciences and discover the real inventor of Domain Driven Design (~1920), the first proponent of (business) agility (~1912), learn about the first agile teams (~50 B.C.) and how trust has been built without a blockchain (~330 B.C.)I am sure that knowing such cases will help people in the software industry to avoid hazardous mistakes as a result of misunderstood concepts from social sciences and thus achieve their goals in software engineering much easier.