Take a look at, for example,

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Topgrade,-SHA1-Encryption.aspx

The website is of course /full/ of this kind of absurdity. (That's kind 
of why it exists, after all.)

The question is, why does this kind of nonsense only happen in IT?

Suppose the local government wants to build a bridge across a large 


go with the last one?? WTF?! No! Nobody *ever* does this!

And yet, this is exactly equivalent to what happened in the IT story.

Similarly, TDWTF is replete with examples of people hiring some doofus 
who obviously knows nothing about computers to build large applications. 
That's like hiring an idiot to design a skyscraper for you. And then 
finding out that it collapses a tenth of the way through construction, 
because it's held up by cheese instead of iron girders. What moron would 
hire such a person?

When somebody wants a bridge building, or a house designing, or a road 
laying, or whatever, they hire professional people. OK, I'm sure there's 
plenty of stories of mix-ups and projects that went way over budget or 
time scale. But you don't hear of this nonsense where idiots with no 
clue produce an obviously unacceptable product and still get paid.

So if it doesn't happen in structural engineering, why the hell does it 
constantly happen in software engineering?

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