Yes, this industry is pretty much a race to the bottom (when it comes to wages) by adding methodologies and micromanagement at every corner to make people more “productive”. It’s just sad to see that most people don’t realize that they’re in the race to the bottom just because IT is still paying more than average and/or doesn’t require as many certificates as other fields to get into. The downside of the lack of professionalization is that people abuse developers everyday and the benefits like having more freedom to negotiate your higher than average salary are quickly vanishing in the fact of ever more complex software and big consulting companies taking over internal development teams and departments companies used to have.

To make things worse cloud / SaaS providers keep profiting from this mess by reconfiguring the entire development industry in a way that favors the sell of their services and takes away all the required knowledge developers used to have when it came to development and deploying solutions. Companies such as Microsoft and GitHub are all about re-creating and reconfiguring the way people develop software so everyone will be hostage of their platforms. We now have a generation of developers that doesn’t understand the basic of their tech stack, about networking, about DNS, about how to deploy a simple thing into a server that doesn’t use some orchestration with service x or isn’t a 3rd party cloud xyz deploy-from-github service.

Consulting companies who make software for others also benefit from this “reconfiguration” as they are able to hire more junior or less competent developers and transfer the complexities to those cloud services. The “experts” who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don’t even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren’t aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn’t aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn’t even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.

All those new technologies keep pushing this “develop and deploy” quickly and commoditizing development - it’s a negative feedback loop that never ends. Yes I say commoditizing development because if you look at it those techs only make it easier for the entry level developer and companies instead of hiring developers for their knowledge and ability to develop they’re just hiring “cheap monkeys” that are able to configure those technologies and cloud platforms to deliver something. At the end of the they the business of those cloud companies is transforming developer knowledge into products/services that companies can buy with a click.

I am more alienated by the processes surrounding everything. If I had to do idiotic agile sprint bullshit and also write mind-numbingly boring code I would lose my mind. Luckily I have gotten away with making improvements in architecture so it is at least an interesting problem on occasion.

It sounds like this author would feel better working on open source, a passion project, or a deep academic paper. I think I’d prefer that also. I wish it were easier to live while doing that.

Unionize

I believe the author got the wrong job position. If your job title is something like ‘software developer’, yeah you are measured by the amount of lines of code. You should aim for a senior role such as ‘system architect’ or ‘technical lead’, then you have some kind of guidelines from the sales side of business, and your job is to turn them into requirements and produce the final product, and you choose the tech stack and other details that are inconsequential for sales bug will get the programmers flinging keyboards.

I’m starting to think that “good code” is simply a myth. They’ve drilled a lot of “best practices” into me during my masters, yet no matter how mich you try, you will eventually end up with something overengineered, or a new feature or a bug that’s really difficult to squeeze into whatever you’ve chosen.

But, ok, that doesn’t proove anything, maybe I’m just a vad programmer.

What made me sceptical however isn’t that I never managed to do it right in any of my projects, but the last two years of experience working on porting games, some of them well-known and larger games, to consoles.

I’ve already seen several codebases, each one with different take on how to make the core game architecture, and each one inevitably had some horrible issues that turned up during bugfixing. Making changes was hard, it was either overengineersled and almost impenetrable, or we had to resort tonugly hacks since there simply wasn’t a way how to do it properly without rewriting a huge chunk.

Right now, my whole prpgramming knowledge about game aechitecture is a list of “this desn’t work in the long run”, and if I were to start a new project, I’d be really at loss about what the fuck should i choose. It’s a hopeless battle, every aproach I’ve seen or tried still ran into problems.

And I think this may be authors problem - ot’s really easy to see that something doesn’t work. " I’d have done it diferently" or “There has to be a better way” is something that you notice very quickly. But I’m certain that watever would he propose, it’d just lead to a different set of problems. And I suspect that’s what may ve happening with his leads not letting him stick his nose into stuff. They have probably seen that before, at it rarely helps.