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Software Disenchantment (tonsky.me)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/programming

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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)?

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Programmer time is more expensive than computer time.

That might excuse inefficiency if all of these things were true:

The programmers (or their employers) were buying new computers for all their users
The new computers were fast enough to keep slow software from wasting users' time
The electricity to run them was free and without pollution
The resources consumed and waste produced by that upgrade cycle had no impact on the environment

What's really happening here is that producers of software are making things cheaper and easier for themselves by shifting and multiplying costs onto the users and the environment.

The amount of waste is staggering. It's part of why I haven't enjoyed professional software development in years.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see you've met Jira. :)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

There are far worse things in the darkness than jira :( but yes.

[–] atheken 8 points 1 year ago

I’ve tumbled down this rabbit hole on more than one occasion.

This line of thinking can lead you to the conclusion that the only ecologically just thing to do is for humans to cease to exist.

It’s a trap that can lead to despair.

Do your part to be mindful, respectful, and conservative with resources, but don’t give in to nihilism.