Old man yells at cloud

> 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.

Dunno, I like my 200 series land cruiser. 2008!

I’m looking for a 1997-2000 LS400 at the moment.

It's probably not going to be a popular counterpoint, but for instance, Microsoft has used 365 subscription fees to accelerate the development of Office and in my estimation it is actually getting better over time.

I also wonder what "software engineers have lost their culture" is meant to be measured against. There was lots of just utter bullshit software 20 years ago too.

This entire post is pretty much the definition of having rose tinted glasses when remembering the past. There was a lot of annoying shit back then too, you just choose to not retain those memories.

This article disproves its own thesis. The article shows that technology has gotten objectively better, the problem is that better technology is a double edged sword, but cynics only like to acknowledge the negatives.

This contradiction is perfectly embodied by the first example where the author bemoans 45 minutes to download 20 gigs over the internet (which is even a bit slow by today's standards). In the time of the n64 that the author alludes to you couldn't even download 20gb from local media to a hard disk in 45 minutes, not to mention there is no hard drive or media even available on the order of tens of gbs. This is objectively better technology, in fact, the technology is so unbelievably amazing that the author is actually impatient about waiting 45 minutes for what was literally a feat of grandiose fiction as imagined by the video game player of 1996.

Of course, it's not lost on me that when you want to just sit down and play a game, it's frustrating that advancements in technology can also be used to create a barrier to your enjoyment, certainly this is not good and nobody likes it, but it doesn't then follow that the technology is objectively worse because of it. Also, there are others who actually like this, they'd be excited to know that they're getting the freshest experience with bug and content updates, there are many people who deliberately hold off playing new games so that they can wait for the first round of patches to fix major issues.

All the other examples suffer from the same kind of contradiction, but I won't elucidate each one, the point is, technology has gotten objectively better.

I should write an article, "Old Man Yells At Cloud: Ungrateful hedonists don't know how good they have it"