Interesting comments, I was expecting a roughly 50/50 split for folks who buy into the “intrinsically hard” story where Reqs change or highly integrated systems

Interesting comments, I was expecting a roughly 50/50 split for folks who buy into the “intrinsically hard” story where Reqs change or highly integrated systems just tend towards breakdown vs the “enshittification” story where software quality just falls victim to planned obsolescence, greed, or simply pointless changes caused by fake jobs and the typical make-work. The third explanation is practitioner incompetence and indifference. Regardless of whether we are talking apps or apis, it’s never been easier to keep around old versions and skip the bitrot but most people just don’t know how to do that. This doesn’t mean it’s hard, just that they’d rather screw over some subset of users than learn how to do proper versioning and releasing. I phrase it like this because I think it’s a choice people make, and thinking about things like backwards compatibility and dependencies is seen as unsexy and just a thankless chore. If someone wants to dodge it then eventually some one else will get assigned to clean the mess. Next person will do just enough to escape the situation without really fixing it and so on. The attitude is basically “It’s not like we’re the ones who have to use this crap! Ship it”, and it’s present everywhere from corporate to open source, projects big and small. Part of it is a lack of pride/craftsmanship, but even senior folks are going to yolo their next release sometimes unless there’s some process in place that prevents it.