You will have to define what you mean by “worse” and “lately.” I have over four decades experience in software development and I don’t think we ever had high-qu

You will have to define what you mean by “worse” and “lately.” I have over four decades experience in software development and I don’t think we ever had high-quality code, reliability, or good security. We have some examples from the old days that survived and have some of those traits, but I see that as survivor bias — the really bad code gets replaced or forgotten. Programmers often fail to understand that companies pay to develop software to make money, to solve business problems. Software doesn’t get written because it has intrinsic value, it gets written as a tool used to make money. In a profit-driven environment with short-term priorities, the attributes programmers call “quality” may not matter.