12 Lessons I Learned from the Software Industry

1. Back in the old days, (1980s) we had this joke: QUESTION: What's the difference between a software salesman and a used car salesman. ANSWER: A used car salesman knows when he's lying.
LESSON 1: You can believe your own bullshit, but it doesn't make it true.
LESSON 2: No matter what you buy, you're going to get lied to.
2. You can sell a lot of stuff based on differences that don't make a difference. One software company boasted that its product could control kerning (letter spacing) in 1/50,000th an em-space increments (about 0.0000016 inches or 16 ten-millionths of an inch). The competitor in only 1/1000th of an em (about 0.000083 or 83 millionths of an inch). But the highest resolution printers had dots that were 0.00029 inches (29 hundred-thousandths). Both competitors had greater control than could be shown or printed. Still today!
LESSON 3: When differentiating your product, choose a feature that ignites people's passions but doesn't make a difference and can't be proven.
LESSON 4: Buyers have no concept of what is actually important to them.

3. The software industry's first priority is selling software. You always have to sell the next version. A product that is complete and can't be developed any further is obsolete. There can never be a 100% solution or the software company would go out of business. Software companies inherently collude in forcing trickle-down upgrades to products dependent on them.
LESSON 5: There must always be a 'critical' feature or 'discovered' flaw to drive the next version.
LESSON 6: It should always be more costly to change to a competitor than to upgrade.

4. Security sells. Software companies routinely add and sell more secure versions rather than educating users on safe use. The best way to get a customer to change products is to convince them the competition exposes them to greater risk and is not secure.
LESSON 7: A perceived or promoted threat from outside will divert attention from real problems inside.
LESSON 8: People would rather be protected than act responsibly.

5. Software is designed and created by engineers. Engineers know how to write code. Therefore all problems can be solved with more code. Not all code works with other code. The answer to that problem is more code. Engineers almost never understand the industry for which they are writing code. They understand how to write code.
LESSON 9: Solutions create problems.
LESSON 10: Those who create solutions seldom understand the problem.

6. Even if the leader of a software company has never written a line of code in his or her life, all solutions to all problems and concepts for improvement will look like the brainchild of that leader. Engineers will be scrambling behind the scenes to try to make product sense out of what the leader says.
LESSON 11: Sell customers on the vision and you can blame others for failing to fulfill it.
LESSON 12: We have no concept of the path between vision and the future.

This is all stuff I learned from the software industry. It has nothing at all to do with the 2016 Presidential election.