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> The basic problem of our world is that it is ruled by 20-sometings that loath working on "old" tech. disagree completely, it's not the 20-somethings that com
by tetraodonpuffer 9y ago
> The basic problem of our world is that it is ruled by 20-sometings that loath working on "old" tech.
disagree completely, it's not the 20-somethings that come to you and say "the budget we have is limited, and we have to prioritize, feature X might get us more exposure, so work on that and it doesn't matter if it breaks backwards compatibility, users will adapt"
If upper mgmt goes after "oh shiny" there's not you can do at the individual contributor level, and if you know you are in a "oh shiny" management situation there is also no incentive whatsoever in spending time making sure you think about the future when developing, since you're going to have to throw everything away anyways in a few months or a year at the most.
It's all about "being nimble" and "velocity" and "being innovative", where all of them are more or less shorthands for "churn things quickly until something sticks". Stable, reliable, dependable software is unsexy, if the company you work for is large enough you might be able to find a team that works along those lines and be happy, otherwise it's fighting fires all the time.
- digi_owl 9y agoThen why oh why do i keep seeing FOSS projects with limited to no commercial interest keep doing rewrites with the latest "shiny" in mind?!
- panzagl 9y agoBecause writing software is a fun hobby, maintaining it is work.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y agoThat's just a misunderstanding. There is a lot of fun to be had in maintaining others' code and there's nothing like finding a stupid bug (and fixing it) to boost your self-esteem as a programmer. But maintaining code (especially shitty code) gets you much fewer rewards and recognition than writing new code from scratch (including shitty code) -so that may be a better explanation of why most people don't like being "maintainers".