Today I’m Glad I Work in Software

                                                                                  Wicked will be released this month

Today I’m really glad I’m a software developer who can harness the power of the Internet to update silly errors.

In another world I might be a toy company employee (low-level). Working for Mattel would probably be excellent and present many toy-based opportunities. It wouldn’t be as good as working as a software engineer though. Let me explain why.

An Unfortunate Error

Mattel create lots of toys for children, so you’d think they would know what they are doing when the landed the deal to produce Wicked dolls depicting Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande.

However it didn’t take long to realize the problem with the domain www.wicked.com printed on the packaging.

Everything is Fine

“We deeply regret this unfortunate error and are taking immediate action to remedy this.”

I’m pretty sure that a designer put in a placeholder domain onto the packaging and then the copy check was…insufficient.

This has led to a curious situation. If you decided to click on the www.wicked.com link you’ll be sent to the following website.

Since this product is already on store shelves, I’m surprised that they haven’t withdrawn the product. Perhaps they need to ship tape to retailers to hide the offending link. At the moment they’re doing nothing, and as a result face a Twitter backlash that might just hurt their brand.

So far, the CEO survives. The person who committed the error is fatum ignotum.

This type of issue doesn’t happen in software development, and I am incredibly glad for this.

The Software Parachute

As software developers we know that mistakes happen all of the time. As a tech industry we seem to understand this and have put processes into place to remedy errors.

Agile means we can improve software while we work on it instead of waiting to ship it.

We can change Strings on the fly on the web. Sure, our mobile friends need to create a new release but that’s really their fault for deciding to work FE jobs.

At the most extreme we can roll back our changes (unless you are Sonos) and “fix” issues without needing to interact with retail channels.

Sure, there are some boxed software products that exist…where again? I guess Sony press disks?

Conclusion

It’s great being a software developer. We can fix issues without interfering with our customers or spoiling anybody’s day. That is quite excellent, isn’t it?