"The colonial Indian government decided the cobra population should be reduced, and decided the solution was to pay a generous bounty for every cobra carcass it received. What the government hadn't anticipated was that some enterprising individuals would start breeding cobras, because cobras were now lucrative. This was bad, but what happened next was worse - the government cancelled the program, and everyone who'd been breeding cobras suddenly had no incentive to keep the snakes, so all the captive cobras were released into the wild."
"For example, the yaml designers' decision to parse "no" into "false" works well ... as long as the yaml document doesn't mention Norway. The country code for Norway, "no", gets auto-converted into "false". Cummins mentioned that systems thinking is part of the solution. Nothing exists in isolation, and when considering technical solutions, we must consider how changes in one part of a system might produce unexpected effects in another. But systems thinking can be time-consuming, so we sometimes need"
Software development requires working with both computers and people, creating unique challenges and shared problems across fields. Decision-making in complex systems risks well-intentioned choices producing unintended consequences. A historical example shows incentives can create perverse outcomes when bounty programs encourage breeding of the targeted pest. Data formats and parsers can introduce surprising errors, for example automatic conversion of "no" into false breaks country codes like "no" for Norway. Systems thinking and statistical literacy reduce risk by revealing interactions and hidden effects, though they demand extra time. Growing hardware parallelism makes mastering concurrency essential. Automation and AI will affect job markets and roles.
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