That sounds like a line by someone who has never seen the disaster that some incompetent people can do. Design is not necessarily something done by a kind of my

That sounds like a line by someone who has never seen the disaster that some incompetent people can do. Design is not necessarily something done by a kind of mythical "architect" (whatever that means...); instead, a good programmer simply very often write software that has a good design. And I would say than in most areas, design is effective and required. NT works. 9x is long-dead (and even 9x had tons of design, but there was just a gap too immense on some fundamentals to get anywhere) I would even make the hypothesis that good design is always eventually effective and required, but the period of time after which lack of proper design hits you badly varies, and in some fields it is actually longer than the lifetime of the product...