Youtube, twitter, and reddit have obviously been in the news a lot recently, but every day business applications also seem to just keep getting worse. Got new PCs at work which means version updates, and pretty much everything we use (autocad, adobe acrobat, and ms office, mainly) all seem to run much slower, despite the computers having substantially higher specs. Love that I can't use any old versions or alternatives because they refuse to grant me admin access.
I love capitalist innovation! Why make things better when you could just make them worse and charge more?
I was just talking about this with some of my CS meet-up people in our virtual hangout. The group is most 25-45 in age from all sorts of backgrounds and stuff, and we all agree it's bonkers pretty much every program are so bogged down with features and functions that are used by like .0001% user-base but add an 100X in load times and performance costs.
Not only are these programs full of bloat, I can only imagine the code that makes these things are just full of hacks and "fixes" that need to be reworked from the ground up. I think the craft of building software has been negatively impacted by the whole "get it done" mindset of startups rather than "get it right" of yesteryear.
I've heard people suggest that the craft of software development has been hobbled by Moore's Law. The available computing power has increased so rapidly that there has never been pressure on devs to produce clean, elegant, efficient software. Instead they just produce endless spaghetti code and the problems and inefficiencies are hidden by the available compute power.
That makes a lot of sense. I can certainly see the market incentivizing doing spaghetti so "it just works"/"Automagically" or whatever. I understand the problem space for programs and software has increased exponentially but it's weird to think our problem solving has not. That's one thing I always respected about older tech is that they had to know what they were doing to get the most out of things. Not to say it was some golden age of software but I think there is a noticeable difference.
Ideally I would like to believe in a decent world (not even our commie leftist utopia) we would be applying the lessons and efficiency of modern tech to tech problems. I would reckon that pretty much everything written these days could have some serious performance improvements if they were in a manner that valued performance. I really do think "THE MARKET"'s focus on "deliverables" and just makes stuff worse. Why write good code when I could write code that gets my manager off my back?
It's weird, because usually if you don't have to worry about performance, it's easier to make readable code. I think feature bloat correlates to Moore's Law though, because of the economic incentives to use more computing power for little reason. The spaghettification just follows because of rushing to implement all those features.
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While this is extremely true and I think probably worth about 2/3s of the blame, I still think that there is a 1/3 blame on software engineers turning out to be second-rate (people pursuing the field just because it pays well attracts a lot of low-quality coders) AND our general unwillingness to unionize and push back against the managerial types to say that we practice a craft and it deserves to be done to a standard. We should be embarrassed.
Of course a LOT of software devs are bazinga-brained shitheads. Or if they aren't then at least they hold the opinion that they're paid so well that they don't need to unionize or care about these other things. I have seen that opinion start to shift these past few years. Even software devs are beginning to form basic class conscious thoughts even though they haven't been able to act upon them. Quite a shift from even just five years ago.
It's cheaper for companies to force end users to upgrade their hardware, than it is for the software companies to hire more people to optimise software