This article touches on A LOT. I would say the focus is on why software projects are so large and complex. I think about Fallout 4, a remarkably buggy and inefficient piece of software; I think about the React + Redux web app that a previous employer sank millions of dollars into to succeed a perfectly functional, perfectly adequate C# MVC WebForms app; I think about how it seems today’s software engineers are valued not by what they built but by what they
know.
1. Fallout 4, a game released by the notorious (for bugs) Bethesda Softworks in 2015. Despite the ample bugs, some of which were ignored by Bethesda and ultimately fixed by an unofficial, third-party patch, it won Game of the Year in 2016 from BAFTA. In 2015 I lacked the hardware required to run this game above 30 FPS. Today, I have a $2,000 monitor and a $1,000 graphics card, buuuuut Fallout 4 doesn’t recognize newer graphics cards and defaults the quality to “Low” with the lowest resolution possible. Additionally, it doesn’t support ultrawide monitors as many games these days do. Finally, it crashes every couple of minutes. I’m not sure why. It’s not a mod causing it. I’m using a normal aspect-ratio monitor now. So this game, not even 10 years old, has been abandoned by Bethesda. Like Fallout 3 before it, I’ll probably have to install a litany of unofficial patches and make edits to config files to get this game to run the way it should out of the box.
2. SS&C’s, Advent Software’s, Black Diamond’s “BD3.” The amount of effort that went into the UI was, to me, obscene. Probably 40 devs working on this. We had a Storybook as a style guide. We had internal tools (also in React and using Redux for… some reason). The web app looked beautiful, BUT always had bugs. Always. An area of the site would be enhanced, and then there’d be some bugs. I once spent about a week working through a bug that only happened on mobile Safari, and the CSS fix was ultimately hacky. To debug this, I had to have a Mac connected to an iPad, and use Safari’s debug tools to connect to the Safari on the iPad. I remember it didn’t “just work”. All this effort to make a web app whose primary purpose was to look good. I think the main concern was keeping up with the competition. Evidently custodians like BlackRock bounce around wealth management platforms and we were directed to cater to every whim of the large clients. If they wanted some bullshit little toggle on the benchmarking page to show grid lines, one of our dev teams would inevitably spend hundreds of man-hours making it happen. If they didn’t, we might lose BlackRock, which would be worse than spending $100,000 on adding grid lines to a chart.
3. I have actual, useful code on Github. I have a catalog of Medium articles I’ve written on subjects like ETL, AWS and Azure. My StackOverflow is in the top 5% this year for rep received. All of that means fuck all to any employer if they are looking for someone who is familiar with DataBricks and I’ve only used Spark and AWS Glue (for example). I get it, most people’s Github profiles are in a sad state… but wouldn’t you rather hire someone who clearly knows what they’re doing, than someone who say solves your Leetcode in O(log(N)) time?