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I like the Uncle Bob explanation: the number of developers has a doubling rate of ~5 years due to the constant entry of new developers [1]. Over time, the numbe

I like the Uncle Bob explanation: the number of developers has a doubling rate of ~5 years due to the constant entry of new developers [1]. Over time, the number of inexperienced developers far outweighs the experienced ones. Inexperienced developers naturally gravitate toward complexity because they don't know any better. Couple that with a social drift toward hyper-specialization. That sort of hierarchy naturally creates minds that don't think at the systems level. This is the general theme of Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth: the shift toward hyper-specialization (or narrow focus) has long-term disastrous consequences. When you couple inexperience with narrow focus, you get messes. Part of this is to blame on the industry-standard thinking that because someone works for Company X, they're a competent, logical engineer (and should be granted authority/responsibility over essential products/projects). This is the downfall of "code tests" and "whiteboard coding." They don't evaluate for systems level thinking and so a developer with poor creativity and logic skills slips through the cracks because they're great at eeking performance out of a function which impresses the lollipop guild. [1] https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html

agumonkey 4y ago
society also changed, tech is trendy, ecobronerds have the wheeldrive
jiggawatts 4y ago
It's even worse than the Uncle Bob explanation. There are thresholds of effort for certain things at largely constant levels. E.g.: designing a new language, build tool, web application framework, or database all have some minimum effort that needs to be invested. In the past, there just weren't enough developers in the entire world to "overdo" these things, so there was a relatively small pool of languages, tools, and frameworks to choose from. Now, individual corporations have armies of junior developers spitting out frameworks and query languages like a machine gun. There's so many now that you or I haven't even heard of 99% of them! As the number of available developers grows exponentially, so does their capacity to "reinvent wheels". Their ignorance of existing wheels to they could be reusing grows exponentially also. The result is an exponentially exploding set of ad-hoc, incompatible systems. In my recent semi-DevOps, semi-Cloud-Engineer role I've come across an absolutely bewildering array of tools even when I've generally restricted things to one cloud and one language's ecosystem. Heaven help you if your project has multiple languages!
abledon 4y ago
"The lollipop guild" , amazing lol

agumonkey 4y ago

society also changed, tech is trendy, ecobronerds have the wheeldrive

jiggawatts 4y ago

It's even worse than the Uncle Bob explanation. There are thresholds of effort for certain things at largely constant levels. E.g.: designing a new language, build tool, web application framework, or database all have some minimum effort that needs to be invested. In the past, there just weren't enough developers in the entire world to "overdo" these things, so there was a relatively small pool of languages, tools, and frameworks to choose from. Now, individual corporations have armies of junior developers spitting out frameworks and query languages like a machine gun. There's so many now that you or I haven't even heard of 99% of them! As the number of available developers grows exponentially, so does their capacity to "reinvent wheels". Their ignorance of existing wheels to they could be reusing grows exponentially also. The result is an exponentially exploding set of ad-hoc, incompatible systems. In my recent semi-DevOps, semi-Cloud-Engineer role I've come across an absolutely bewildering array of tools even when I've generally restricted things to one cloud and one language's ecosystem. Heaven help you if your project has multiple languages!

abledon 4y ago

"The lollipop guild" , amazing lol