I'd like to buy Zack a drink, because all of this is obvious to those poor shmucks among us that handle the support end of things (also known as the "shit end").
I've been saying a lot of the same things for years. I'm tired of it now; I'm starting to give up, because it's obvious there isn't a programmer out there that gives a damn. You can try telling them that there's something wrong with software -- something fundamental, something in the process itself that has become horribly broken -- but they'd rather tell you why you're wrong rather than really listen to why you're frustrated.
Then if, as a user (or programmer) you complain about something, they say, "So build your own version." What, we're supposed to re-build the world? OK, fine. So you start building your own version of something. Then the response is, "Why are you reinventing the wheel? That's already been done."
But, what the fuck do I know? I spent a couple of hours in a meeting today with a client explaining why upgrading -- er, pardon, "migrating" -- from Joomla 1.5 to 1.7 wasn't going to happen without a lot of money involved. Then I went to another client and we fixed a broken Windows network stack and a handful of other stuff. Then I came home and unboxed the new laptop that I just bought because my old one could no longer run Firefox anymore -- even though it ran it just damn well fine enough a few years ago. Other than the new laptop, this is pretty much my day -- all day, every day. Well, me and the other guy in my shop.
And nobody else seems to think there's anything strange about this stuff. So Samba's documentation is a mess and Samba 4 never got around to implementing allowed_users, which is absolutely necessary in a Windows AD environment? Pfaah, big deal, so what? So Western Digital's backup software interferes with Outlook in funny ways? Psh. Who cares, who's that going to affect? So everybody's decided to abandon sane software versioning altogether and make the support end of things even more nuts? Hah! Get with the program you support idiots, you're supposed to want to spend all day upgrading software and dealing with the inevitable fallout.
Besides, users that don't like upgrades are just morons, they just don't know what they like. As soon as they get used to the new version, they'll like it better, you'll see.
All of this is stuff I've personally heard, or seen in places like HN ... and not just a few times here and there.
Software used to be fun. I remember when it was, when it seemed like most things just worked, even though they didn't look pretty. I remember when it seemed like I could just open something up and start hacking on it without having to hold tens of thousands of lines of code in my head, spread over dozens of files. I remember when looking at someone else's code could actually teach me something, instead of making me want to cry.
I really don't like this industry much anymore. I guess that makes me a bad hacker or something.