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Why did software become worse lately?

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Re: Why did software become worse lately?

#11

Post by michelsedgh »

linguae wrote: post #10
michelsedgh wrote: post #2

I wonder why everything became worse lately. The software, food, services, healthcare, cars, amazon, social media, google, politics… literally everything that was good is now worse. I was thinking to myself and I couldn’t name anything that became better honestly. Please prove me wrong so I’ll be a bit happier tomorrow.

Speaking from a US-centric point of view (I don’t know the situation abroad), making a living and keeping up with inflating costs feels like being on a treadmill that goes faster every year, with more and more demands for productivity from employers. I fear not being able to keep up. These employers face heavy demand from their shareholders to grow at all costs to keep those stock values increasing. It’s all about a…

I am in the US, and what I notice is it must be worse everywhere else because the US exports its inflation more to other countries by the virtue of Dollar being the reserve currency and everything else is priced in Dollars. So it must even be worse everywhere else.

Re: Why did software become worse lately?

#12

Post by michelsedgh »

eimrine wrote: post #9
michelsedgh wrote: post #2

I wonder why everything became worse lately. The software, food, services, healthcare, cars, amazon, social media, google, politics… literally everything that was good is now worse. I was thinking to myself and I couldn’t name anything that became better honestly. Please prove me wrong so I’ll be a bit happier tomorrow.

> Please prove me wrong so I’ll be a bit happier tomorrow. Recreative drugs are great nowadays, there are new stimulators on the market and new ways to consume such as battery-powered pen-shaped little something.

So ur telling me I should drug my brains to feel happy?! I can’t say I understand what u mean by this comment.

Re: Why did software become worse lately?

#13

Post by michelsedgh »

cuu508 wrote: post #6
michelsedgh wrote: post #2

I wonder why everything became worse lately. The software, food, services, healthcare, cars, amazon, social media, google, politics… literally everything that was good is now worse. I was thinking to myself and I couldn’t name anything that became better honestly. Please prove me wrong so I’ll be a bit happier tomorrow.

Small new cars are safer and have lower emissions than older models from same class. They are worse in some other aspects though

Yeah but the build quality is much worse than just a few years ago. They have many issues out of the factory. There’s even many statistics that came out for this and even articles.

Re: Why did software become worse lately?

#14

Post by michelsedgh »

rudasn wrote: post #4
michelsedgh wrote: post #2

I wonder why everything became worse lately. The software, food, services, healthcare, cars, amazon, social media, google, politics… literally everything that was good is now worse. I was thinking to myself and I couldn’t name anything that became better honestly. Please prove me wrong so I’ll be a bit happier tomorrow.

Well, you can be a little bit happier tomorrow if let go of that train of thoughts for a little while and do something fun for you.

I’m generally happy, but proving me wrong in this would make me a little happiER ;) Still no examples of what’s better tho. You can argue AI is better, but I have yet to see actual use cases in daily life for it. The algorithmication of everything in my opinion is what made a lot of stuff worse… Hacker News isn’t worse tho, you can say that.

Re: Why did software become worse lately?

#15

Post by gregjor »

You will have to define what you mean by “worse” and “lately.” I have over four decades experience in software development and I don’t think we ever had high-quality code, reliability, or good security.

We have some examples from the old days that survived and have some of those traits, but I see that as survivor bias — the really bad code gets replaced or forgotten.

Programmers often fail to understand that companies pay to develop software to make money, to solve business problems. Software doesn’t get written because it has intrinsic value, it gets written as a tool used to make money. In a profit-driven environment with short-term priorities, the attributes programmers call “quality” may not matter.

Re: Why did software become worse lately?

#16

Post by bradley13 »

Since the Internet really took off, there has been a huge and unrelenting demand for software. Everything from basic websites to cloud services to the stuff running in the cloud.

Lots of people have taken up the role of developers, but most of those people are not very good. Lots of sweatshop development, with zero knowledge of, or attention to either security or quality. People using frameworks and libraries they don't really understand, to get product out the door fast.

Re: Why did software become worse lately?

#18

Post by chrisjj »

linguae wrote: post #5

Just a few of my opinions regarding why there’s so much low-quality software: 1. No culture of craftsmanship in software outside of niches such as native Mac software development. “Move fast and break things” was supposed to mean embracing iterative development practices and not being afraid to make changes when necessary, but this philosophy has been stripped of its original context, which has resulted in recklessne…

> "Move fast and break things” was supposed to mean ... not being afraid to make changes when necessary

I wonder how much of today's world of broken apps can be attributed to that unfortunate wording.

Necessity of change should be no impediment to healthy fear of the consequences.

Re: Why did software become worse lately?

#19

Post by chrisjj »

eimrine wrote: post #7

Don't you confuse services with software? My unconnected laptop works perfectly for me. What about examples, I always mad when my old devices stops being functional despite nothing has changed in electric circuits. Ati videocards have no free drivers, Blackberry devices can not render webpages due to https requirement out of thin air, some parts of Lenovo laptop do not fit to another one duo to lock in BIOS. BTW look…

> Blackberry devices can not render webpages due to https requirement out of thin air

They can still render the pages they used to render, right?

The problem is that generally such pages are no longer published.

Re: Why did software become worse lately?

#20

Post by proc0 »

It's because the engineers that build the software are also testing their own features, and are also generally tasked with handling the analytics as well, not to mention planning, tasking, and managing expectations. In other words, multiple engineering roles on the product development side have collapsed into a single role, and I believe this has impacted the industry significantly.

I think in part this happened because of how tools evolved and have become more automated, but on the other hand, there is probably some incentive from the business side to make teams less specialized and more easily replaceable. The cost is probably worth it for business because nobody demands quality software, which is the root of the problem. The end user has not fought back against endless updates to patch buggy software that somehow still has responsiveness problems with extremely powerful hardware. I guess not enough people care, and so companies structure businesses accordingly. On the flip side, there might soon be opportunities for software companies to provide a better experience via good engineering, and reverse the trend a little.

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