Robert Charette has some pretty damning stats in this piece.

Take, for example, spending. Spending has increased markedly, $1.7 trillion to $5.6 trillion, but success rates have not:

Global IT spending has more than tripled in constant 2025 dollars since 2005, from US $1.7 trillion to $5.6 trillion, and continues to rise. Despite additional spending, software success rates have not markedly improved in the past two decades. The result is that the business and societal costs of failure continue to grow as software proliferates, permeating and interconnecting every aspect of our lives.

Sounds akin to hardware, where all the components got faster yet somehow everything is slower.

Back to spending:

the annual cost of operational software failures in the United States in 2022 alone was $1.81 trillion, with another $260 billion spent on software-development failures. It is larger than the total U.S. defense budget for that year, $778 billion.

Wait what? Say that again? The costs for operational software failures in the US were more than the defense budget?!?

Success doesn’t even matter. When trillions are being spent, all you want is to have a finger in the pie.

So how do we make software better?

successfully implementing Agile or DevOps methods takes consistent leadership, organizational discipline, patience, investment in training, and culture change.

Notice there’s no mention there of technology. Success doesn’t come from tech. It comes from people empowered by it, not exploited by it.

Lastly, two grandiose understatements about tech:

Given previous promises, skepticism is warranted.

ethical considerations have routinely lagged when technological progress and profits are to be made.

Sadly, from past experience, this mindset of complacency and hoping for the best is the result of natural human mental drift that comes when there are long periods of apparent normalcy. Even if there is a slowly emerging problem, as long as everything looks okay in the day to day, the tendency is ignore warning signals as minor perturbations. The safety of the system is assumed rather than verified—and consequently managers are led into missing clues, or making careless choices, that lead to disaster. So these recent indications of this mental attitude about the station's attitude are worrisome.

Mental drifts resulting from normalcy led to diplomacy efforts trumping engineering concerns resulting in more bugs and an erosion of safety?

That sounds familiar. Maybe the problems with building software are just human problems.