This industry is completely screwed. The MBAs have successfully taken over the industry and turned it to shit. There’s no respect for craftsmanship, no respect for deep work, and a constant push to reduce labor costs.
I have been in the industry for 20 years and if I could leave tomorrow, I would.
Great analysis / report. At times a bit repetitive, but that could be useful for people skimming or jumping or quoting as well.
Despite 91% of CTOs citing technical debt as their biggest challenge, it doesn’t make the top five priorities in any major CIO survey from 2022–2024.
Sad. Tragic.
I’m lucky to be in a good, small company with a good, reasonable customer, where I naturally had and grew into having the freedom and autonomy to decide on things. The customer sets priorities, but I set mine as well, and tackle what’s appropriate or reasonable/acceptable. Both the customer and I have the same goals after all, and we both know it and collaborate.
Of course, that doesn’t help me as a user when I use other software.
Reading made me think of the recent EU digital regulations. Requiring due diligence, security practices, and transparency. It’s certainly a necessary and good step in the right direction to break away from the endless chase away from quality, diligence, and intransparency.
The problem is that it’s not just software. Shareholders and corporate “leadership” have collectively decided that they are willing to sacrifice any and all future success in order to make stock prices go up today. They don’t know where the business will be in five years and frankly, they don’t care. Virtually all of the big names have completely stopped innovating. Cramming “AI” into their shitty products and trying really hard to pretend that’s it’s something different or “new” when it’s just the same shit but with more bloatware.
Manufacturing isn’t much different. I worked at a specialized industrial tool manufacturer for a few years. They were trying to add a new “smart tool” line and demoed it at an international trade show only to get completely excoriated by their customers who were all like, “Don’t even talk to me about ‘smart’ tools when the [very expensive] tools you already produce don’t fucking work.” But that’s how it goes when your business is built on acquisitions and the way you make your stock price go up is by coasting on your brand portfolios past success while simultaneously eliminating the people who made that success possible.
I’ve burned out on software development and swore to never touch a piece of code again. It’s only 5 years since my MSc in ComSci which almost feels pointless by now. I felt like I was screaming into the void when I tried to fix the issues we were creating while we rushed for immovable deadlines dictated by higher ups and gut feelings ignoring the capabilities and competencies of the team. Even my hobby programming took a nose dive and has been sitting untouched for years. Dreams of creating innovative solutions for real problems crushed by the ever increasing weight of ignorance permeating my profession.
I quit my dev job end of December. I had enough. After my resignation I started looking into upskilling myself to project management (yes, my resignation was maybe a bit irrational with no plan) where I feel like I could actually make a difference and be listened to. But even that doesn’t seem like a done deal, so my plan A right now is consultancy work where I can recommend, be on to the next client and project in half a year, and never think about the fallout they’re causing because they didn’t listen to my expertise.
But then I read this article. I have no words for it. Without having decades of history to see what has been and what should be, only the last 5 years of fast track to developer hell, I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly was the problem. But every single word of this article speaks to me. It actually gave me the courage to go to my computer and work on a piece of software I have been putting off for 2 years. Like, right now. Maybe we can turn this shitshow around. Or for me it at least gave me enough motivation to put actual work into my startup idea.
I really hope we fix this shit because development and IT was my passion. Ever since I got my first PC it spoke to me. I understood it, it understood me. I really want to reignite that passion and feel the drive to be solve problems. I wish everyone who wants to move the needle good luck, we all need it.
Thanks for listening to my uncensored ramblings, this just hits very close to me.
That’s wonderful to read, that it caught and motivated you.
I suspect these systematic issues are much worse in bigger organizations. Smaller ones can be victims, try to pump out, or not care about quality too, but on smaller teams and hierarchies, you have much more impact. I suspect the chances of finding a good environment are higher in smaller companies. It worked for me, at least. Maybe I was just super lucky.
I’ve been a developer for thirty years. This is mostly nothing new. I’ve been ranting about the next quarter mentality since the early 00’s. Cool shit does get built, but it’s mostly hacky stuff that proves its value and then must be turned into the real product it pretended to be.
I’m much closer to the deliver management side of things (at least that’s what my timesheets say) and it’s still someone who has only thought about happy path stuff deciding and selling (Tia customer or to upper management) how long a project should take before there are even people to build it.
I’m ramping up a project now to replace an existing hacky React solution with a BFF/orchestration service with a Salesforce front end. It’s been scooped at 4 months since I was hired on 5 months ago. Wednesday we had a meeting to the effect that it was only scoped as a dumb proxy to rebuild the same janky solution in SF that we have in React. Except in none of the planning meetings did that ever come up. So I’ve been architecting an orchestration layer and the customer is only expecting to pay for dumb proxies. I wonder how this project is going to go…
That being said, I’m not hating the job. It’s always been this way. I’ve always had to fight with my managers to eek out decent products while working with my team on what can be compromised and removed from MPV in the how the customer will see the value and give it more phases of development to achieve the original vision. I even have a common refrain for my customers: “I want to make you happy. If my company can turn a profit from that, that’s between you and them.”
69% of developers report losing 8+ hours weekly to inefficiencies—20% of their time (Atlassian, 2024)
Yep. If there is any company that knows what it takes to drive inefficiencies, it’s Atlassian. (Fuck them and their software.)
How many of those 8 hours are because bit bucket is down? I’d bet at least 1. I swear their uptime is measured in 8s instead of 9s (as in 88.88, not 99.88)
Jira, where productivity goes to die
Now imagine solving that and becoming 25% more efficient, but still getting the same wage. (historically, the leadership rakes in all the profits without sharing when efficiency increases)
I’d rather be chill and blame some third party. Hail Atlassian.
Or, continue delivering at the same rate and spend 25% more time just chillin’
I’d rather be chill and blame some third party.
Can’t plausibly blame em if they solve the efficiency issue
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This email could’ve been a meeting, where you aren’t allowed to talk, and at the end we will finally get the task done… of scheduling an additional meeting! 🤝
“You can save 20% time by using Robo for automation!” Click. Can’t even automate what I do.
Great read, all entirely valid points, 0 chance of it reversing the trend. As an industry, we have given up on quality, and we aren’t going back.
Instead, most organisations don’t tackle technical debt until it causes an operational meltdown. At that point, they end up allocating 30–40% of their budget to massive emergency transformation programmes—double the recommended preventive investment.
I can very much relate to this statement. Many contracts I’ve worked on in the last few years, have been transformation programmes, where an existing product is rewritten and replatformed, often because of the level of tech debt in the legacy system.
More succinctly: in the vast majority of cases, just-in-time spirals into too late and not enough due to material and consistent lack of investment.
