Does software evolve? Do we evolve it? 1. Legacy codebases accumulate not only a ton of "normal" tech debt but larger codebases within larger orgs have the bat

Does software evolve? Do we evolve it? 1. Legacy codebases accumulate not only a ton of "normal" tech debt but larger codebases within larger orgs have the battle scars of a sort of "forced evolution". Bandaids on bandaids, pulling in new frameworks and patterns all requiring often heavy transplants. Like a future archaeologist finding artifacts of the steam engine, combustion engine, nuclear reactors and lithium batteries you can infer the good intentions but unlike the original implementors you can clearly see, with hindsight's 20/20, the "unforeseen" side effects they couldn't (or were just incentivized not to). Unlike those societal-scale energy innovations the microcosm of human engineering optimism and naïveté that is your organization's legacy codebase had a more rushed "artificial" evolution that was likely a casualty of the kind of short-sighted, rushed product-roadmap dynamics we're all too familiar with. Less a million-year evolved shark and more a "cute" purebred pug. Can we go right to the shark? Probably not. We'll make hundreds of thousands of pugs before we ever get to the shark. In the meantime the optimist will see these pugs as forcing-functions that help evolve the encompassing ecosystem at-large to be more conducive for the entrant of a "shark". 2. You ask "have we screwed ourselves?" and I think this might imply too much confidence in the perception of how "separate" we are from these iterative codebases. To go back to the evolution metaphors, we're just introducing mutations under real-world conditions. Each product of that evolution is a reflection of those conditions more so than the potentially great ideals any single stimuli in the petri dish possessed at the time she took part in the engineering. By the very nature of large-scale, cooperative engineering we bake-in our collective foibles and the engineering disciplines we hold at any given time are just one, usually smaller, dynamic at play. 3. I may sound pessimistic, over-deterministic or that I think our efforts are futile in light of larger dynamics but I'm not, I'm sipping coffee right now, I'm good. Acknowledging that we have an outsized perception of our affect in these situations may help relinquish you from the oftentimes infuriating pain that accompanies the mundane banalities of daily software engineering. Champion the better ideas, sure, but maybe with a good-humored flexibility that comes from knowing today's great ideas are just memes bootstrapping the evolution of tomorrow's much greater ideas and in this chaotic soup there's some beauty. Trust me, this is not the Zen outlook I'm able to stay within at all times (or even most of the time) but I want to try to and also remind myself why I thought all this software stuff was cool in the first place. I'll end with a quote I'm reminded of. “For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes