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I think it belongs in the category of self-licking ice cream cone. The more bloated it gets the more stakeholders there are wanting it to get more bloated. The
by api 3y ago
I think it belongs in the category of self-licking ice cream cone. The more bloated it gets the more stakeholders there are wanting it to get more bloated.
The same thing drives government bureaucracy growth and the ridiculous amount of administrative overhead at universities. At the root I think a lot of this kind of thing is a kind of unplanned jobs program.
I also think a related sort of dynamic might drive complexity growth in software. Every layer and every feature has stakeholders and people employed to maintain it, and all those people become defenders of all these things.
One of the factors behind “worse is better” in software and systems engineering might be that worse employs more people. Clean well thought out systems are not inefficient enough to create large communities around them because they don’t need enough babysitting.
- tromp 3y ago> The more bloated it gets the more stakeholders there are wanting it to get more bloated. Or, as Oscar Wild stated: The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
- dopylitty 3y agoYou hit it right on the head calling it an unplanned jobs program. So many jobs are unnecessary busy work (Grabers bullshit jobs) that only exist because of this insistence that people have to earn their living by sitting at a desk all day. The reality is that the current standard of living could be maintained or even increased with many fewer people working. Or an even better standard could be reached if those people could be doing jobs that are actually useful like construction, nursing, or basic scientific research. Unfortunately the economic system doesn’t value those things so people only do them if they’re desperate, passionate, or independently wealthy.
- happyjack 3y agoI saw your comment when I was scrolling through and I wholeheartedly agree. Our system does put a price on "well you have to earn your keep and you have to sit here all day." I'm not sure how or if it could be done, but there is definitely enough wiggle room and waste in our current system that we could have people start doing more useful things with their time.