4 ms·
> Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards. Agree that is a f
by warent 4y ago
> Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards.
Agree that is a factor, but a small one.
> It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.
Respectfully disagree here. Systems have been complex for decades. Who knows when the last time was a single person understood everything about their computer (with respect to both hardware and software)
The problem is simpler imho. Really it's just a problem of perverse incentives.
1. Coding schools / bootcamps are incentivized to churn out people branded as "senior" when they have a mere 6 months of practice.
2. Managers are incentivized to churn out "features" and "changes", built on tenuous connections to some half-baked customer research.
3. Engineers are pressured to "move fast and break things" while simultaneously switching between teams/companies for easy promotion, before getting a chance to fix the things they broke.
The list goes on and on. Basically there's this massive house of cards where everyone is incentivizing each other to do shoddy work and not be thorough.
- civilized 4y agoSystems have been complex for decades, but bad incentives are more recent?
- bavila 4y ago> 1. Coding schools / bootcamps are incentivized to churn out people branded as "senior" when they have a mere 6 months of practice. What boot camp is purporting to graduate "senior" developers after 6 months?
- bb88 4y ago>> Respectfully disagree here. Systems have been complex for decades. Who knows when the last time was a single person understood everything about their computer (with respect to both hardware and software) Apple II/IIe/IIc. Nibble Magazine published the complete disassembly of the firmware at the time -- which was kind of a big deal. Apple chose not to sue them for violating copyright (which they could have if they chose). Here's the Apple IIc schematic: https://archive.org/details/Schematic_Diagram_of_the_Apple_IIc/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/Schematic_Diagram_of_the_Apple_I... The hardware wasn't super special either. It was a 6502 with 74x series logic gates. The hardest part would have been the floppy drive controller. But even that seems conquerable by today's standards. It's worth while comparing this to the Commodore computers at the time which had special chips. The 64 had the sid chip. The Amiga 500 had even more special chips. Further that was part of the Jobs/Wozniak philosophical discussion. Woz thought computers should be hackable. Jobs thought it should be a walled garden. In the end, Jobs won, but left me behind as a customer. A part of me wishes the RiscV computers would catch on -- even if they are slower. It would then be much simpler to understand a computer.
- schoen 4y agoDidn't Apple (and some other companies) also publish some form of schematics (and microcode listings?) for the Apple I and other roughly contemporary machines?
- tablespoon 4y ago> The problem is simpler imho. Really it's just a problem of perverse incentives. It's probably even simpler than that: 1. Once software stopped being distributed on discs, managers cut QA and pre-release bug-fixing, because they'll just "fix it later in a patch." If course the patches often have problems too, which will be fixed in later patches with their own problems, ad nauseam. It's a case where a legitimate technical advance ultimately lead to worse outcomes, because it disrupted certain social "checks and balances."
- pjmlp 4y ago4. Some countries allow the misuse of "engineering" titles even when people lack the background for having them
- paulryanrogers 4y agoIndeed. If one hasn't built and maintained siege works for at least two seasons, or one crusade, then one hasn't earned the title of engineer.