Imaginary problems are the root of bad software

Not necessarily. It's just that most developers have never worked in a setting where they got to work on problems properly.

Solving real problems for real people is very addictive. There is a reason some people like working for startups. It's because you live very close to your users and when you make them happy you know.

The second interesting fact is that if you just plow ahead and solve many real problems fast you will eventually run into problems that are both real and interesting.

After having tried that there has been no going back for me. I am allergic to imaginary problems. It feels as pointless as watching people who are famous for being famous argue on TV.

I think we are all victims of our feedback loops. (University) Education sublely teaches us that the only important problems are those that are very difficult and preferably have never been solved before. Those same problems also make for better blogposts. In the real world the incentives are mostly opposite. Problems with no known solutions (or only really difficult solutions) are generally bad. They can be worth it, but you should stay away from them until you know that are worth it. Software engineers seem to almost pride themselves on not knowing what their users want.

It takes a while to scrub all that bad learning out and replace it with something better. Unfortunately some people are stuck.

And that performance optimization done prematurely often achieve complete opposite result. Meanwhile performance optimization done at necessity rarely have the same problem.

We also get slower with so many people. The coordination overhead is killer and losing context as the product is sliced up into small parts that move on without you

Until we figure out a nice metric for "removing complexity" and then rewarding for it, it's not likely to change, IMO.

This is a massive change from my first software industry job in 1997.

I was essentially a “design intern who knows HTML” on a team that built a shrinkwrap Windows application for enterprises. The core of the design team was a graphic designer, a cognitive scientist, an industrial designer, and a product manager with industry experience in the customer domain.

The application was Windows native. User research was conducted on site with scientific rigor. Adhering to platform guidelines and conventions was a priority. I think I spent a few weeks redrawing hundreds of toolbar icons so they’d be in line with the Office 97 look (the kind of boring job you give to the junior). If the app stood out on the Windows desktop, that would have been considered problematic.

Today a similar design team would only have a graphic designer and a PM, and neither of them would care the slightest about platform guidelines or customer domain. The UI is primarily an extension of the corporate brand. Hiring a cognitive scientist? Forget about it…

Everything certainly wasn’t perfect in the Windows/Mac desktop golden era. But the rise of the web wiped out a lot of good industry practices too.