>In my opinion, most software these days looks like it's built with a lot of duct tape and the bare minimum level of skill necessary. Somewhere over the past f

>In my opinion, most software these days looks like it's built with a lot of duct tape and the bare minimum level of skill necessary. Somewhere over the past few years, I came to peace with this point. Because production software tends to be really gross, for complicated but legitimate reasons. In fact, I think the beauty is in keeping something that looks really mangled operating with any degree of success - that is in fact the mark of a successful and functional team, if they are able to keep it all working with any degree of sanity. This is not to say that your second point, about bare minimum level of skill necessary, isn't also incredibly valid. But, I don't blame this on individual workers, but rather on the system (IE: don't hate the player, hate the game). Incentives are to make your money in a phase of the moon and move on. Incentives are to move up or out. Incentives are not to build quality, but to build good enough. So long as that's how the incentives are structured, it's how the game is going to go.