It's funny how many engineers, especially in Silicon Valley, presume themselves apolitical and above such petty social concerns, when the process of making software is itself intensely political.

Hell, just being put in tech lead position and having to juggle engineers’ opinions tells me just how much of a minefield we’re in.

> when the process of making software is itself intensely political

How is making software more political than doing maths?

So by political, I'm conflating two meanings. A lot of Silicon Valley techies are apolitical in a sense of against government intervention, believing that science and their own rationality would be able to do better than the social institutions and powers-that-be. That sort of ideology is fine to have, but I suspect the same mindset can lead to neglect of the politics informed by the second meaning, which simply refers to the practice of negotiating, group-work, wheeling-and-dealing; in that sense you can also call it "business" decisions.

Creating software, whether in a corporation or in an open source project, is more often than not a process that involves many stakeholders, processes, and yes irrational traditions or even "religious" ideology (spaces vs. tabs, etc.). So any time you have more than one person writing a program, things will get political. The decisions behind software-making is a political process.

Mathematics, in contrast, is probably not political except in the higher levels of academia.

> So any time you have more than one person writing a program, things will get political.

I agree with you that the software industry seems to struggle more with these kinds of political issues.

However, there are many human endeavours that also require input from large numbers of stake holders and they seem to cope (i.e. going to the moon, building a bridge, building a skyscraper etc.).

That suggests the problem is not so much the large number of stake holders, but rather the software industry struggling to cope with situations requiring large numbers of stakeholders.

Quality on the initial revision of Apollo Program hardware and software wasn't great. They did as well as they could given the constraints at the time. But there were numerous failures along the way, and several missions survived mostly through blind luck.

>...apolitical in a sense of against government intervention, believing that science and their own rationality would be able to do better than the social institutions and powers-that-be.

That's an explicitly political position.

You're talking about writing code.

The gp is talking about: requirements; allocating budget between research, salaries, testing, development, support, marketing, exec's pockets, shareholder's pockets, etc.; decisions about which standards to support or not; agreements with other firms; etc. etc. etc.

Software is the automation of processes. Processes are intensely political, because they effect the world.

Well after just having a 5 hour meeting discussing what exactly constitutes the Presentation Layer vs the Application Layer and debating about whether Authentication counts as business logic in the presentation tier, I can tell you for certain it is Political at times.

Math may not be political. Often it’s the input to the math that’s political.

Besides, the software engineering process is full of political decisions. What does an “unbiased” search engine mean? When you build a recommendation service, do you intentionally reinforce bias of the user or expose the user to other points of view? How do you define and handle abuse of your service? I could go on and on.

The Manhattan project and the Apollo project both contained a lot of maths and were also highly political.

> And to add the icing to your cake, more often than not there are no consequences for those making these bad decisions.

Not for the folks making the bad decisions, anyway.

Promotions aren't consequences?