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I think it's a cargo cult problem. We see massive companies showing off their solutions to gigantic engineering problems that can only be solved in a certain wa

• lovich 8y ago
  I think it might go deeper than just the engineers, although we are definitely a large part of it. The basic issue is that most companies don't compensate employees for compentently building software. Technical debt is always a future managers problem so it's both, never worked on and preventing it is never seen as a big accomplishment when evaluating an engineer. Secondly managers are people and people like flashy things. When someone says they built the website in vanilla js because it works and we won't need something more complicated for years, the manager isn't going to get that excited or remember when raise time comes around. If the engineer says they rewrote an application from [legacy language] to some hip new language that the manager has heard about from their peers in other companies who are also rewriting their applications, it's going to stick in the managers head when they are rating their employees. You get what you pay for and modern companies are paying for semi working but flashy software more than they pay for solid but boring software