I've been in the industry since 1998. Things have gotten worse. Part of it is that in certain ways more is expected of software today but that's not entirely tr

I've been in the industry since 1998. Things have gotten worse. Part of it is that in certain ways more is expected of software today but that's not entirely true. Currently I'm involved in working on a "data intensive" app which munches a few dozen gigabytes of data and presents summarizations through a web based UI. Usually in the form of charts, time series plots, heatmaps etc. Adding small, incremental features to it is an ordeal. The "backend team" needs to mock and then provide the API endpoints, then the frontend team needs to "break down the work on the React components", then DBAs need to oversee the new queries. The security team needs to review risk impacts etc. One change is at least a few weeks of work. Contrast that with the work that I did in 1998. It was a "data heavy" desktop application that visualized in 3d seismic data collected by ultrasound probes. The data volumes were in the order of hundreds of megabytes up to a gigabyte. The app was built as a desktop app using FLTK and OpenGL. It took about a day or two to roll out an incremental feature once we knew what was being asked. By two weeks it was in all of our customers' hands. While there was no Stackoverflow.com and we relied primarily on offical documentation with the help of "Effective C++" and "More Effective C++" the build/debug/test cycle was much shorter, the tool chain was much simpler and more transparent, the UI toolkit was much easier to grok and even though it didn't have an "elegant state framework" somehow we made it work well without turning it into a mess. As an industry, we gave up on localized desktop processing in the name of "consumer preference" (or so we were told) while we assumed an immense amount of complexity in order to server the same computation from a centralized place.