So it's resume driven development that's causing issues?
Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
251–260 of 511 posts
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absolutely a thing, but I'd say there's a related option which is "Job Listing Driven Development". The more niche, dated, or specific your platform is, the harder it is to hire people onto the team who don't need months of on-the-job practice and training to be useful. You see the most extreme versions of dangers of this in stories about governments and older companies having to pay insane salaries to bring…
What's kind of funny is that MUMPS is equally as archaic and idiosyncratic as Fortran or Cobol, yet there are companies willing to put new hires through a bootcamp to make them productive. Are all the Fortran and Cobol companies too small to afford a month or three of training time on new devs?
My guess would be that the entities short-sighted enough to still be using those languages in 2023 are also ones short sighed enough to not invest in the training to preemptively hire juniors without the skillset to train them up.
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#253If anything it's the incentive system in software industry, which is at fault. 1. No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives. 2. No engineer is paid extra for keeping the codebase without growing too much. It's re-writes and the effort he puts in to churn out more solutions (than there are problems) that offer…
They're not mutually exclusive. FOSS software has vastly different incentives than commercial software, yet suffers from many of the same problems: bugginess, poor performance, lack of documentation, feature misprioritization, bad UI. That alone indicates that the problem is not merely "misaligned incentives". Actually, you can reduce most problems down to "misaligned incentives" if you're overly reductive enough. Th…
I think Free Software suffers from the misaligned incentives. Take documentation for example. Why would I write it? I already know how the system works. I designed it! If I forget in a few years, a quick glance at the code will refresh my memory. One would argue that you should write documentation so that people will use your thing. That's true! But there is almost no incentive to have users; you pay a cost, but they pay nothing in return. (Someone will send a bugfix now and again, of course, but it's very very rare.)
Some other incentives are balanced, though. Persistent low performance or bugginess affects the author and end users equally; the more the author uses their own software, the more this will hurt. Sometimes the low performance is a design trade off; Python isn't Rust, and the users seem to be okay with that. It was done on purpose. Sometimes low performance is a factor of the author's needs; you're trying to run the thing on 1 billion machines, they only have 1; something has got to give. But that's not misaligned incentives so much as it is lack of suitability for a particular purpose. A screwdriver is terrible for hammering in nails. That's not the screwdriver's fault.
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#254If anything it's the incentive system in software industry, which is at fault. 1. No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives. 2. No engineer is paid extra for keeping the codebase without growing too much. It's re-writes and the effort he puts in to churn out more solutions (than there are problems) that offer…
I don't think these "No"s are entirely right, though they are directionally right. But there are actually healthy businesses (and healthy divisions within less healthy businesses) out there that do incentive those behaviors, and it's a huge competitive advantage for them.
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#255> Most complicated or broken software is not designed to be overly complex or dysfunctional.
I beg to differ. This might have once been true, but no longer. Now developers demand a massive arsenal of dependencies before they are even willing to start on any project.
You say you need a web page and a few events? No problem. I will just sprinkle in some React, Redux, Grunt, GraphQL, PM2, and a plethora of plugins for each with a cascading list of dependencies for all those plugins. We absolutely cannot do less, because the risk of writing original code is too costly and we value retaining employment (blaming someone nameless outside the company).
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#256If anything it's the incentive system in software industry, which is at fault. 1. No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives. 2. No engineer is paid extra for keeping the codebase without growing too much. It's re-writes and the effort he puts in to churn out more solutions (than there are problems) that offer…
Maybe I am biased by my background in finance tech but I saw a ton of guys get rewarded for what (at the time) seemed like boring maintenance of systems. In retrospect - it was recognized that they built or took good care of money making systems with little drama and that was well appreciated by the companies. In FAANGs I see now more of "what will get me promoted" versus "what is gonna make the company money" ethos.
Promotion driven features are definitely not entirely a myth IMO, but on the other hand, anecdotally I saw quite a few people get promoted at Google for doing make-things-work-better work. The trick was figuring out which were the important things to maintain and make small improvements to, rather than just which were the things that seemed fun to tinker with, but weren't as impactful.
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with the controls is mostly because they don't want to pay for Qt (multiplatform toolkit), so instead every company (badly) implements their own controls in HTML to save money. I suspect ultimately they waste much more money than they save.
Qt isn't even in the radar of most companies currently building multi-platform applications in HTML. And it won't be soon, for two main reasons: developers able to use it are expensive, and most Qt applications in the wild still have the "uncanny valley" look and feel about them on every OS but Linux. Not to mention that with SaaS being more profitable than selling unlimited-use licenses, a lot of apps also have HTTP…
All this sounds great from the perspective of retail shrink wrap software. Today, the major use cases for Qt on the desktop are in-house corporate software.
And, no one cares about "uncanny valley". Only HN and online nerds care about that stuff. Average, non-technical, corporate users care about functions, not form. Hell, they are happy with a VBA app! Also, lots of in-car and in-seat (aeroplane) entertainment systems are built in Qt.
If you want a "Premium" native look and feel
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#258If anything it's the incentive system in software industry, which is at fault. 1. No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives. 2. No engineer is paid extra for keeping the codebase without growing too much. It's re-writes and the effort he puts in to churn out more solutions (than there are problems) that offer…
Maybe I am biased by my background in finance tech but I saw a ton of guys get rewarded for what (at the time) seemed like boring maintenance of systems. In retrospect - it was recognized that they built or took good care of money making systems with little drama and that was well appreciated by the companies. In FAANGs I see now more of "what will get me promoted" versus "what is gonna make the company money" ethos.
"finance tech" -- those people maintaining those systems are middle-aged, comfortable, and well-paid. If you were junior under them, you would never want to stay. Fifteen years ago, there were large fresh hire classes each year. Tons of juniors around the office. Plenty of young ones dreaming up unnecessary "upgrades". Most of that is gone as the industry has matured. If anything, the hoards of junior hires have moved from finance to Big Tech.
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#259If anything it's the incentive system in software industry, which is at fault. 1. No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives. 2. No engineer is paid extra for keeping the codebase without growing too much. It's re-writes and the effort he puts in to churn out more solutions (than there are problems) that offer…
I really think we have too many people working at most companies. It pushes people to the extremes and edges just to have something to work on. Managers need more people under them to get promotions. And managers want to manage managers to keep moving up. They fill teams of people on products that could really be ran by a fraction of the engineers. But that’s not where we are, we are on large teams working on small a…
Yeah I dunno, I hear this a lot, but there has universally been way more work to do than people to do it at every company I've worked for. But that doesn't mean the right things are being prioritized.
Re: Imaginary problems are the root of bad software
#260This is a good addentum to the Bullshit Jobs thing that was posted a few days ago.