Recently re-discovered this gem of a blog post, written in 2018 by Nikita Propokov, about his disenchantment with the state of modern software. Do you think it's still relevant today (perhaps more/less so than it was when it was written)?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

That's not the problem.

Software used to be an artisan job, a skilled engineer carefully sculpts a solution for a problem.

Management didn't have much to add there, or visibility, this was a world-breaking problem for them, where was their value?

The solution was issue-tracking, make every line of code a bureaucratic nightmare, ensure panopticon-like visibility for everything, that guaranteed the manager was always in control.

Progress slowed to a crawl, that's fine, you just need to hire more developers, hundreds, they scale, right?

Good programmers stick to startups because large companies are just well-paying torture firms. I wouldn't go back to Google for any amount of money, but I'll do a startup almost for free, because they let me write code.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments