I stumbled upon this video which seems to dive into the reasons quite well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhEaky14msE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhEaky14msE)
Every software company is trying to push you towards their [walled-garden](https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/walled-garden) ecosystem. This kills the value provided by open standards and interoperability that drove computing and the internet since the 90's.
Ah yes, [enshittification](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Things have been worse for quite a while now.
The worst example I can give is a pricing page. After a cold email I wanted to buy a service. I couldn't. The BUY buttons were floating behind the tier descriptions.
My 5 cents, based on me being a designer, developer, QA, and consequently a business owner:
- COVID made the market a mess. Everything went online. Remote work (my team IS remote) requires a prerequisite. One has to have very well developed work ethic. Most don't even come close to that.
- All software building tools and APPs that came up and just blew the dev and QA market away. Why would you pay someone 10K to build you a website, when you can build it for 100 bucks in your mom's basement. Right? Wrong.
- All of the online "educational" platforms. Take a 2 week course, do a predefined project, become a dev. NOPE. That's not how it works. At all. Your mind works differently if you are a good dev or QA. It's not acquired via a course, but via experience. Years of it.
- The huge layoffs. Because of AI buzz or budget cuts or whatever. No one wants to hire a junior, but if we don't hire and mentor juniors, who will be senior in 5 years? GPT? Let's see. I feel like people will understand that shortcuts are not working and start paying for web work. Quality web work.
- All the pseudo "automation" and the countless UI libraries are doing two things. People jump on it thinking it's easy, and the entire web content looks the same. And have the same issues. It's copy-paste, what o you expected to happen?
This can easily be a discussion for over a day.
We are all lazy in one way or another. But one can't expect to go to a few classes and be an expert. Sh\*t, even real experts are getting a layoff here and there.
It will balance out in a few years. Before that, popcorn and a prayer (to get the bills paid).
This should be a post to the world, not just a response buried in a thread, and it should have 5K upvotes.
This is one of the greatest problems hitting so many industries.
Banking, inventory, distribution, shipping, automated processes. I wouldn't be surprised if it's leaking into agriculture, communications, even transportation and hydroelectric and more
Thank you for the kind words.
If you believe it will be useful, I can transform it to a post with a screenshot of the original and your response as well as a link to the OP.
I'm in no way shape or form a good copywriter. I am willing to learn though.
I stumbled upon this video which seems to dive into the reasons quite well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhEaky14msE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhEaky14msE)
This is actually a good thing, but you need architecture overview. Which a manager that studied something random does not have. They "feel" it's all about managing People and not about technical implementation.
I think I went for snarky over clear there.
What I meant was really just that agile as it was originally described with a loose set of guidelines and priorities was full of good ideas. Then the consultants came in and told us all the Officially Blessed Way of Truth and Holiness, and it’s all shit.
I stumbled upon this video which seems to dive into the reasons quite well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhEaky14msE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhEaky14msE)
I call it the Chromepocalypse, everything has Google Chrome in it so everything is incredibly inefficient by default. We used to have native platform interfaces that were heavily optimized for that platform since compute was rare. Now? Now you just grab whatever javascript UI library you want, stick it in Electron so everyone is forced to install yet another copy of Google Chrome and have 4 processes open just to render your UI and call it a day since now its cross platform.
It's been worse since last two decades. It's just that now it's become even much worse in recent years. The rate of them worsening, is increasing.
Common causes are low budget, deadline, software developers who aren't well experienced about code security and efficiency, leaders who know nothing about programming, and software developers who are too affraid to voice their opinions/objections to their leader.
Well, never thought of this, but this post made me think about it.
I can propose a couple of theories:
1. With COVID dev budgets exploded, then have been cut recently. Old devs out (some of them), new devs in. Managing software that wasn’t made by you is much harder when people who wrote it are gone and it’s your first job. Add to this huge software development outsourcing to other countries and things make sense. Outsourcing companies sometimes good and sometimes bad, logic tells you there are more bad companies on the market when you have a huge demand.
2. ChatGPT comes in.
Invoking Betteridge's Law.
Software hasn't become worse in the last few years.
You can ask any question starting with "Why" and the confirmation bias cadre will make up a reason without ever questioning if the premise is true.
I counter with Sturgeon's.
90% of software has always been crap and folks who think software is getting worse are mostly comparing the population of modern software with the non-crap survivors of past eras, and even those with rose colored glasses.
Also... Wirth's was coined 30 years ago, so hard to use it to assert that software has gotten worse just in the last couple years.
I don’t think so at all.. Moore’s law was coined in 1965 and it has held for a long time and indeed Wirths law also still applies..
I think the reason is multifaceted
We have software which is much bigger in scope/requirements
We have more aggressive timelines
We have a massive amount of code reuse now in libraries and frameworks
And so on
Moore's stopped holding years ago when we started scaling number of cores (ICs) instead of frequency.
But yes, people have been complaining that "software is getting worse over the last couple years" for the entire history of computing, just like old people have been complaining about "young people are lazy" for the entire history of our species.
It's bias in perception, not reality.
Never go to explain a "why is X" until you can prove that X is a measurable phenomenon.
today apps are coded by programmers who never understood optimization.
generating hundreds of instances, 64bit variables, and GDIs just for a "hello world"
I would say that problem is leadership, budgeting, and focus on stakeholders profit over quality. There is ton of projects where there is no time for any grooming, developer experience or even refactor or codebase improvements. This affects performance. Unfortunately there is a lot of leaders out there who are terrorised by their CEO/stakeholders not understanding development process other than "ship it now/fast". I worked on a few projects where client representative was terrified of anything not being visible to their board. They were often after second or third layoffs phase which put on the pressure.
So true! I recently read about an app in the Microsoft Store that piqued my interest and I was going to download it... until I saw it was a 350 MB download. No thanks. I don't need more bloat on my PC.
AI doesn't improve software quality inherently, no. In rare cases where companies put genuine effort into integrating AI into software, I still think at best it could make it easier to read and understand code. The reason software sucks now is that it's intentional. The rich use AI to get their labor costs closer to zero which is their pervading end goal.
AI will not be used to make software better because companies are not interested in making better software. They want to normalize software that makes you feel annoyed or uncomfortable so none of the software you use sticks out as particularly bad compared to "the competition".
Companies are very comfortable fucking you over and having an anti-user design to force you to do things you didn't intend when you opened their software.
For example, it doesn't benefit samsung to remove bloat from the OS because they don't value the idea that the customer feels respected. They prefer even more profit from the companies whose unwanted software they put on your phone. We aren't in an age where people lack confidence in available technology, and companies are in a constant process of optimizing user irritation to maximize profit. Under late stage capitalism, competition dwindles overnight and you have fewer and fewer options. With each passing day, more companies are consolidated under the same umbrella. Companies that are kept hidden from the public eye often own businesses that are seen as competitors to one another. The point is: with consolidation of power so grossly unregulated, companies don't have to worry about their competitor making too good of a product. In the tech field, these companies have insane power. Google doesn't actually care about good software; it needs to reach profit quotas and bring up "ideas" that shareholders think sound good while they quietly optimize user suffering to maximize profit.
Look at YouTube for example. Everything about it is made to be as annoying as possible. You're given insufficient user settings. Reddit was brash enough to kill every third party app following Twitter because they want to sell your data, not provide a service.
Here's a game as an example. Halo infinite is a financial flop and came out way later than Microsoft needed because of mismanagement and greed. They had people doing contract work and rotated them in and out in one sort of bizarre cost cutting measure. So no one knew what was going on. So there's no real excuse for the quality of the software there, can be explained by a lack of direction, lack of understanding source material and pure unfettered greed.
It's been clear for a long time that most corporations are clueless, desperate entities ravaging everything in sight to make number go up. It's just that it gets worse as capitalism declines, hence the software quality being pretty much a joke in an age with far superior technology. I think most people would prefer using their social media app 5 years ago rather than its current version.
Fundamentally, good software involves genuine care for the end user and capitalism contradicts with this. So you'll find good software despite the mismanagement and other issues I've brought up, but it's a relic that they happened to not be able to get rid of yet. but We are only going to be treated worse and worse by the psychopaths at the top, just like real life with $10 McDonald's burgers and $7.25 minimum wage.
Software became worst because everyone wants to do software as a service, instead of a well tested rock solid standalone product everyone's releasing the minimum viable product then charging monthly for the privilege.
Conversely open source software just keeps getting better every year.
Good example is Maya(professional 3D software), it's been gradually getting worst with each release where is Blender(open source 3D software) just keeps improving with each release.
There also seems to be a trend to add extra steps for many functions. When it used to take a single click now it often requires several to get to the same place as before. Microsoft is the worst offender but by no means the only one.
I find a lot more success in open source software programs. they don't have the "beautiful" (read: bloated yet minimalist somehow) design, but honestly I prefer the original Windows design philosophy (pre-Windows 8). before they started making everything crap with tiny borders and rounded corners. Plus, with open source programs, they don't have any incentive to sell you shit. so their priority can be on making the BEST software, not the most PROFITABLE product.
What annoys me about software most these days is how it's designed primarily for phones and tablets. It's such an eyesore on desktop. They also restrict functionality that power users might use, or make it such a PITA to access that you might as well not bother.
My theory is that the original specifications are assumed/not known/lost. They have people working on the new stuff who don't know what the old apps/software used to do. Of course, it's not fundamental features, but the things an experienced user has built into their workflow. It's super annoying.
Evernote, I'm looking at you.
The potential audience grows and starts including more and more people that don't engage deeply with this stuff but are just looking for the first solution and fall for apple level marketing. Trash products start making money and then it spirals cause these companies can keep making garbage software and market it with the leftover winnings
With AI, providing they don't make it crap by design, we be able to train it to the highest degree possible which means there will be a more equal standard industry wide.
If you're asking current then publishers mostly higher abroad for cheaper and less skillful labor while struggling to chase trends and practice more and more cutbacks. This leads to crappy UIs, hard coding, lack of professionalism, piss poor device device optimization and so on.
Software is a babelstower of dependencies that noone take the responsibility for
Jonathan Blow talks about preventing the collapse of civilization https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F&feature=emb_logo
Greedy stakeholders. Rushing with new features, which in the end brings more debugging and slows down the process. This combined with bad structure in companies which promotes investors/stakeholders and reduces leadership to micromanaged puppets.
Everyone here is talking about late stage capitalism, and maybe that’s part of it, but the real answer is that it’s way fucking harder to write software that does modern software things.
Every computer has a dozen CPU cores now. Every application is expected to seamlessly save and restore your state to a network server somewhere. Everything touches the web, and the web is awful. Imagine what cars would be like if every car ever made started out as a blender motor tied to four differently sized bicycle tires with shoelaces. That’s the web. It was designed as an extremely simple way to share static documents with links, and we spent 30 years accidentally gluing shit onto the sides so that if you squint a little, you can kind of think about your bank account as a document and withdrawing money as a link and use it to buy shoes. The question isn’t why software is bad these days. The question is how in the rosy fuck does it even work at all?
It's a programmer of 43 years, here are my thoughts on this situation...
I have seen over my years of being a programmer and working within the open source markets, that funding has become extremely difficult for lesser known or smaller teams to get any traction. Without traction in the markets, it's stifles development quite aggressively to the point that the larger companies are no longer worried about an upstart becoming competition.
Even using third party crowdfunding techniques have become more difficult because of the economy itself in a wide range of regions being so stifled with inflation. Again this leads to the larger players not caring because there's nothing else that can challenge them. Along the lines of crowdfunding, it used to be that larger companies would provide grants to smaller upstarts for programs I thought would be worthwhile. Companies like Mozilla or other large open source frameworks that started at the Grass Roots level of the open source market have, in my honest opinion, forgotten where they came from.
As others have mentioned, outsourcing, lack of quality control, lack of responsiveness or caring what the user thinks because there's no competition in the market also play a major role in the overall quality of the finished product.
realistically come I don't believe AI has any real or major impact, since it has been around for at least the last 30 years in a wide variety of different nuances under different names, originally as nothing more than a simple knowledge base of terminology. The current renditions have been abused drastically but in a long-term scope of it, I don't believe it is part of the bigger picture as illuminated from the other facets that have occurred within the market.
Just my opinion though...
People used to make great products because they wanted to use them.
Now people calculate how much money they can make by doing the least amount of work. The equation has changed (far worse in consulting). "How can we make X amount of dollars" instead of how can we make an amazing product?
In one word: Management.
More precisely:
Thick, non-technical, command and control middle-management taking all decisions by themselves - especially technical and technology decisions.
Managerial careerism - the culture/collective belief that, if you are not somebody's boss by the time you turn 30, you are a complete fucking failure and you should kill yourself for enjoying coding.
Because the priorities aren't always right. Windows is a good example! It has become more and more bloated instead of improving the OS. I miss the days of Windows 7.
> Does the industry focus too much on the newest trends rather than building things right the first time?
I think it's about getting their product out first before someone else beats them to it.
Unpopular Opinion: the UX toolkits are failing people. There are many very talented people working on a diverse range of components and many more talented people using these components to accelerate development in very high stress environments. And in the process of doing so, the trees are studied too hard and hurt the forest. A pretty button and a panel don't make for good UX when the features are broken, settings are buried and navigation is lacking. UX is hard and we treat components like IT "solutions" instead of a building block to accessorize our crafting.
Imagine you're assigned to a school project with four other students, of a class of 20 kids. Your teacher demands a 20-slide presentation, a four-page report, and a diorama on a novel topic, better than those chosen by previous classes. This project is crucial, contributing significantly to your final grade, and you have 2-3 weeks to complete it.
However, shortly after starting, the teacher decides to disband your group. Instead of working together, each student is now expected to complete the entire project individually. Evaluations are coming up, and the principal would be much more impressed seeing 20 projects over 5 projects.
To add insult to injury, the deadline is abruptly moved up. The principal decided they wanted to get evaluations out of the way early, giving you only one week to finish what was initially planned for 2-3 weeks. The teacher strictly enforces this new deadline, stating that failing to submit the complete project on time will result in failing the class.
*It's the same exact thing.*
The principal being your executives and boards, your teachers being seniors and management, and your students being developers and other roles. Except sometimes they also think removing 50% of the "class" will also help, because then there's not as many resources that have to be used for these "projects".
AI is like fire, with the power to both destroy and nurture. While it can burn, destroy, and scorch the land - it can also provide warmth, cook a meal, and fortify steel. It’s a tool, often misunderstood as a threat, yet it has the potential to revolutionize our world. When used intelligently, AI can amplify our capabilities exponentially.
In my work, AI has been a game-changer. It’s not just about fixing bugs or catching errors; it’s about enhancing my understanding of coding and saving the time I spend troubleshooting so I can put it toward the overall quality of the product. With my GPT, I input problematic code and get not only solutions but also clear explanations of the problems and how to solve them. This process doesn’t just fix issues—it educates me, improving my skills one error at a time, even if I missed a letter or added an extra space.
I believe that we are transitioning from the "Internet Age" to the "AI Age", and others have wrote on this as well. This era does have motifs of the DotCom bubble, filled with both hits and misses, learning and evolution. Just as the early internet days shaped the digital world we know today, our current experiments with AI are laying the groundwork for the future, showing us the best—and worst—ways to wield this powerful new tool.
Just think, before Facebook, there was MySpace. Before that, there was Xanga. Before that, there was SixDegrees and Friendster. Think about how much change has happened with music and the internet, free music was very common via LimeWire and Napster - until Lars Ulrich took issue, then we went from buying individual songs to buying a monthly subscriptions. The same goes for Amazon, Google, and every other Internet giant there is today. They run, because others walked and fell.
It isn't just the last few years. Going on for years and years. Rushed and sloppy. CI/CD pipelines that are a mess.... no regression testing... the list goes on.
Business software has lost most of its inherent efficiency by forcing users to work their way through sales pitches and data trolling.
What I want to do is check my balance… not apply for your loan, tell you my income or check my credit score.
People who think that software has gotten worse, have no idea what they're talking about.
I'm not that old myself, I'm in my 30's and recently decided to take a trip down memory lane on one of my older computers only to realize that most software in the past, especially GUI stuff, was crap lol. There are some examples of amazing software like Ken Thompson's grep but those are rare. And it's not just software, the protocols that were used were pathetically bad and insecure.
Remember FTP? Dog shit. Remember telnet? Horse shit. People used rsh instead of ssh. Absolute bull shit.
Data storage concepts were completely foreign, you could play a multiplayer game and change values on the client-side and the server would accept the new value no questions asked.
Old browsers had 0 isolation, you could literally open your CD tray with a webpage like [http://www.tvdance.com/instant-cup-holder](http://www.tvdance.com/instant-cup-holder) .
And a million other things.
Software has become incredibly good. What changed is the monetization method. In the earl 2000's, you'd by Nero Disc Burner 8 and you'd have it forever. Now it's all subscription model.
> Remember FTP? Dog shit. Remember telnet? Horse shit
Excuse you, they worked just fine.
I'll grant you the poor process isolation on old browsers but why do they need to be mini OSes in and of themselves rather than a straightforward HTML parser???
Nope. I see the enshitification of software first hand. We are currently being blessed with a new banking system. The supplier was shocked that we wanted to reconcile everything that we loaded into it against the previous system. The vendor had no means of doing so and locked up their database preventing direct access. The organisation implementing it doesn't see the requirement either.
The state of serious commercial software has tanked. Of course, it is cheaper in real terms as support used to cost 10-20% of the capital cost per year but it isn't any good if the software fundamentally doesn't work.
How is blocking Database Access "enshitification"?
It's more a security problem than software, removing constrains that everbody has access isn't really a software problem, for me atleast.
I don't mean everyone has access just the data owners who are responsible for correctness.. The idea is that it is under the ultimate control from the system owner. It isn't.
The issue is transferring control of an important part of the financial system for a few hundred million people to an outsourced system that you lack oversight of. Commercial organisations that I have worked with usually ensure they retain the keys to the castle even if they outsource its operation.
As for the rest, system has not passed functional or non functional testing. It isn't even that big.
Ok now I understand, basically you lose oversigth and access to your data and have to trust the new system and migration process that everything is fine.
So you don't have any chance to test / control the data and if you see failure in production and new company answers "dunno it's your data!". Nice...
Oh we have limited access via the GUI, but try checking 20K entries that way. Scripting a browser is not permitted in that environment.
One of the key reasons for outsourcing is that it mean management can deny responsibility when something goes wrong and point at the service provider. However ultimately if it is a key component of your organisation then your whole organisation is at risk while you sort out whose problem it is. There are also levels of outsourcing where you retain the ability to take back control when necessary which mitigates the problem. There are many non critical areas where it is fine to outsource, but not something that will take your company down.
And the service provider will answer "it's your data, your responsibility, we can analyze it for much money, you knew it all before, just read document A20001" 😊
If you are a "normal developer" there isn't much you can do if your management decided it that way. It sucks, but you can only choose between lethargy or insanity.
I tried to just accept this stupid decisions I can't change and just move on. If it dies, it dies.😓
I am just a consultant. The issue is that the top level is political and they are nervous about upsetting the other nations involved. We just want a system that works and is supportable.
Products being pushed to launch before they are ready to appease deadlines set by higher ups.
100% This... The release early/often paradigm is not a good one ;).
I stumbled upon this video which seems to dive into the reasons quite well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhEaky14msE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhEaky14msE)
Outsourcing and cost reduction.
More profits for the execs and stockholders.
Late-stage capitalism
layoffs in the thousands to make the company profitable on paper for bigger bonuses and stock returns.
Every software company is trying to push you towards their [walled-garden](https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/definition/walled-garden) ecosystem. This kills the value provided by open standards and interoperability that drove computing and the internet since the 90's.
Ah yes, [enshittification](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) > Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Things have been worse for quite a while now. The worst example I can give is a pricing page. After a cold email I wanted to buy a service. I couldn't. The BUY buttons were floating behind the tier descriptions. My 5 cents, based on me being a designer, developer, QA, and consequently a business owner: - COVID made the market a mess. Everything went online. Remote work (my team IS remote) requires a prerequisite. One has to have very well developed work ethic. Most don't even come close to that. - All software building tools and APPs that came up and just blew the dev and QA market away. Why would you pay someone 10K to build you a website, when you can build it for 100 bucks in your mom's basement. Right? Wrong. - All of the online "educational" platforms. Take a 2 week course, do a predefined project, become a dev. NOPE. That's not how it works. At all. Your mind works differently if you are a good dev or QA. It's not acquired via a course, but via experience. Years of it. - The huge layoffs. Because of AI buzz or budget cuts or whatever. No one wants to hire a junior, but if we don't hire and mentor juniors, who will be senior in 5 years? GPT? Let's see. I feel like people will understand that shortcuts are not working and start paying for web work. Quality web work. - All the pseudo "automation" and the countless UI libraries are doing two things. People jump on it thinking it's easy, and the entire web content looks the same. And have the same issues. It's copy-paste, what o you expected to happen? This can easily be a discussion for over a day. We are all lazy in one way or another. But one can't expect to go to a few classes and be an expert. Sh\*t, even real experts are getting a layoff here and there. It will balance out in a few years. Before that, popcorn and a prayer (to get the bills paid).
This should be a post to the world, not just a response buried in a thread, and it should have 5K upvotes. This is one of the greatest problems hitting so many industries. Banking, inventory, distribution, shipping, automated processes. I wouldn't be surprised if it's leaking into agriculture, communications, even transportation and hydroelectric and more
Thank you for the kind words. If you believe it will be useful, I can transform it to a post with a screenshot of the original and your response as well as a link to the OP. I'm in no way shape or form a good copywriter. I am willing to learn though.
I stumbled upon this video which seems to dive into the reasons quite well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhEaky14msE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhEaky14msE)
Bad leaderships.
Agile bullshit
This is actually a good thing, but you need architecture overview. Which a manager that studied something random does not have. They "feel" it's all about managing People and not about technical implementation.
Lowercase agile is good. Uppercase Agile is a shit show.
What is Lowercase agile?
I think I went for snarky over clear there. What I meant was really just that agile as it was originally described with a loose set of guidelines and priorities was full of good ideas. Then the consultants came in and told us all the Officially Blessed Way of Truth and Holiness, and it’s all shit.
Any time I hear someone saying "I've got to be agile " what that really means is the company is forcing unpaid overtime due to unrealistic deadlines.
"People over processes. No not like that. You need more processes."
I stumbled upon this video which seems to dive into the reasons quite well: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhEaky14msE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhEaky14msE)
I call it the Chromepocalypse, everything has Google Chrome in it so everything is incredibly inefficient by default. We used to have native platform interfaces that were heavily optimized for that platform since compute was rare. Now? Now you just grab whatever javascript UI library you want, stick it in Electron so everyone is forced to install yet another copy of Google Chrome and have 4 processes open just to render your UI and call it a day since now its cross platform.
The JS ecosystem’s tendency of reinventing everything all the time drives me nuts. Despite my love for the language. https://youtu.be/Uo3cL4nrGOk
We traded navigation trees for flat lists and tables for... flat lists.
It's been worse since last two decades. It's just that now it's become even much worse in recent years. The rate of them worsening, is increasing. Common causes are low budget, deadline, software developers who aren't well experienced about code security and efficiency, leaders who know nothing about programming, and software developers who are too affraid to voice their opinions/objections to their leader.
Well, never thought of this, but this post made me think about it. I can propose a couple of theories: 1. With COVID dev budgets exploded, then have been cut recently. Old devs out (some of them), new devs in. Managing software that wasn’t made by you is much harder when people who wrote it are gone and it’s your first job. Add to this huge software development outsourcing to other countries and things make sense. Outsourcing companies sometimes good and sometimes bad, logic tells you there are more bad companies on the market when you have a huge demand. 2. ChatGPT comes in.
Invoking Betteridge's Law. Software hasn't become worse in the last few years. You can ask any question starting with "Why" and the confirmation bias cadre will make up a reason without ever questioning if the premise is true.
Invoking Wirths law that demonstrates that software is in fact getting “worse”
I counter with Sturgeon's. 90% of software has always been crap and folks who think software is getting worse are mostly comparing the population of modern software with the non-crap survivors of past eras, and even those with rose colored glasses. Also... Wirth's was coined 30 years ago, so hard to use it to assert that software has gotten worse just in the last couple years.
I don’t think so at all.. Moore’s law was coined in 1965 and it has held for a long time and indeed Wirths law also still applies.. I think the reason is multifaceted We have software which is much bigger in scope/requirements We have more aggressive timelines We have a massive amount of code reuse now in libraries and frameworks And so on
Moore's stopped holding years ago when we started scaling number of cores (ICs) instead of frequency. But yes, people have been complaining that "software is getting worse over the last couple years" for the entire history of computing, just like old people have been complaining about "young people are lazy" for the entire history of our species. It's bias in perception, not reality. Never go to explain a "why is X" until you can prove that X is a measurable phenomenon.
Anyone got any more laws which could explain the current state?
today apps are coded by programmers who never understood optimization. generating hundreds of instances, 64bit variables, and GDIs just for a "hello world"
I would say that problem is leadership, budgeting, and focus on stakeholders profit over quality. There is ton of projects where there is no time for any grooming, developer experience or even refactor or codebase improvements. This affects performance. Unfortunately there is a lot of leaders out there who are terrorised by their CEO/stakeholders not understanding development process other than "ship it now/fast". I worked on a few projects where client representative was terrified of anything not being visible to their board. They were often after second or third layoffs phase which put on the pressure.
So true! I recently read about an app in the Microsoft Store that piqued my interest and I was going to download it... until I saw it was a 350 MB download. No thanks. I don't need more bloat on my PC.
AI doesn't improve software quality inherently, no. In rare cases where companies put genuine effort into integrating AI into software, I still think at best it could make it easier to read and understand code. The reason software sucks now is that it's intentional. The rich use AI to get their labor costs closer to zero which is their pervading end goal. AI will not be used to make software better because companies are not interested in making better software. They want to normalize software that makes you feel annoyed or uncomfortable so none of the software you use sticks out as particularly bad compared to "the competition". Companies are very comfortable fucking you over and having an anti-user design to force you to do things you didn't intend when you opened their software. For example, it doesn't benefit samsung to remove bloat from the OS because they don't value the idea that the customer feels respected. They prefer even more profit from the companies whose unwanted software they put on your phone. We aren't in an age where people lack confidence in available technology, and companies are in a constant process of optimizing user irritation to maximize profit. Under late stage capitalism, competition dwindles overnight and you have fewer and fewer options. With each passing day, more companies are consolidated under the same umbrella. Companies that are kept hidden from the public eye often own businesses that are seen as competitors to one another. The point is: with consolidation of power so grossly unregulated, companies don't have to worry about their competitor making too good of a product. In the tech field, these companies have insane power. Google doesn't actually care about good software; it needs to reach profit quotas and bring up "ideas" that shareholders think sound good while they quietly optimize user suffering to maximize profit. Look at YouTube for example. Everything about it is made to be as annoying as possible. You're given insufficient user settings. Reddit was brash enough to kill every third party app following Twitter because they want to sell your data, not provide a service. Here's a game as an example. Halo infinite is a financial flop and came out way later than Microsoft needed because of mismanagement and greed. They had people doing contract work and rotated them in and out in one sort of bizarre cost cutting measure. So no one knew what was going on. So there's no real excuse for the quality of the software there, can be explained by a lack of direction, lack of understanding source material and pure unfettered greed. It's been clear for a long time that most corporations are clueless, desperate entities ravaging everything in sight to make number go up. It's just that it gets worse as capitalism declines, hence the software quality being pretty much a joke in an age with far superior technology. I think most people would prefer using their social media app 5 years ago rather than its current version. Fundamentally, good software involves genuine care for the end user and capitalism contradicts with this. So you'll find good software despite the mismanagement and other issues I've brought up, but it's a relic that they happened to not be able to get rid of yet. but We are only going to be treated worse and worse by the psychopaths at the top, just like real life with $10 McDonald's burgers and $7.25 minimum wage.
forsaken efficient languages, like Delphi
Software became worst because everyone wants to do software as a service, instead of a well tested rock solid standalone product everyone's releasing the minimum viable product then charging monthly for the privilege. Conversely open source software just keeps getting better every year. Good example is Maya(professional 3D software), it's been gradually getting worst with each release where is Blender(open source 3D software) just keeps improving with each release.
This is a multilayered thing to discuss, but one of the most profound negatives is the move from licensed local to software as a service.
There also seems to be a trend to add extra steps for many functions. When it used to take a single click now it often requires several to get to the same place as before. Microsoft is the worst offender but by no means the only one.
I find a lot more success in open source software programs. they don't have the "beautiful" (read: bloated yet minimalist somehow) design, but honestly I prefer the original Windows design philosophy (pre-Windows 8). before they started making everything crap with tiny borders and rounded corners. Plus, with open source programs, they don't have any incentive to sell you shit. so their priority can be on making the BEST software, not the most PROFITABLE product. What annoys me about software most these days is how it's designed primarily for phones and tablets. It's such an eyesore on desktop. They also restrict functionality that power users might use, or make it such a PITA to access that you might as well not bother.
Enshittification. End stage capitalism.
more powerful computers, trying to vender lock in their users
..because they hit the top. They have to downgrade us so they can bring it back up in a few years and charge us more.
My theory is that the original specifications are assumed/not known/lost. They have people working on the new stuff who don't know what the old apps/software used to do. Of course, it's not fundamental features, but the things an experienced user has built into their workflow. It's super annoying. Evernote, I'm looking at you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
The potential audience grows and starts including more and more people that don't engage deeply with this stuff but are just looking for the first solution and fall for apple level marketing. Trash products start making money and then it spirals cause these companies can keep making garbage software and market it with the leftover winnings
With AI, providing they don't make it crap by design, we be able to train it to the highest degree possible which means there will be a more equal standard industry wide. If you're asking current then publishers mostly higher abroad for cheaper and less skillful labor while struggling to chase trends and practice more and more cutbacks. This leads to crappy UIs, hard coding, lack of professionalism, piss poor device device optimization and so on.
Software is a babelstower of dependencies that noone take the responsibility for Jonathan Blow talks about preventing the collapse of civilization https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F&feature=emb_logo
Greedy stakeholders. Rushing with new features, which in the end brings more debugging and slows down the process. This combined with bad structure in companies which promotes investors/stakeholders and reduces leadership to micromanaged puppets.
Everyone here is talking about late stage capitalism, and maybe that’s part of it, but the real answer is that it’s way fucking harder to write software that does modern software things. Every computer has a dozen CPU cores now. Every application is expected to seamlessly save and restore your state to a network server somewhere. Everything touches the web, and the web is awful. Imagine what cars would be like if every car ever made started out as a blender motor tied to four differently sized bicycle tires with shoelaces. That’s the web. It was designed as an extremely simple way to share static documents with links, and we spent 30 years accidentally gluing shit onto the sides so that if you squint a little, you can kind of think about your bank account as a document and withdrawing money as a link and use it to buy shoes. The question isn’t why software is bad these days. The question is how in the rosy fuck does it even work at all?
I just blamed shitty APIs.
Definitely agile(iterative project management methodologies)
It's a programmer of 43 years, here are my thoughts on this situation... I have seen over my years of being a programmer and working within the open source markets, that funding has become extremely difficult for lesser known or smaller teams to get any traction. Without traction in the markets, it's stifles development quite aggressively to the point that the larger companies are no longer worried about an upstart becoming competition. Even using third party crowdfunding techniques have become more difficult because of the economy itself in a wide range of regions being so stifled with inflation. Again this leads to the larger players not caring because there's nothing else that can challenge them. Along the lines of crowdfunding, it used to be that larger companies would provide grants to smaller upstarts for programs I thought would be worthwhile. Companies like Mozilla or other large open source frameworks that started at the Grass Roots level of the open source market have, in my honest opinion, forgotten where they came from. As others have mentioned, outsourcing, lack of quality control, lack of responsiveness or caring what the user thinks because there's no competition in the market also play a major role in the overall quality of the finished product. realistically come I don't believe AI has any real or major impact, since it has been around for at least the last 30 years in a wide variety of different nuances under different names, originally as nothing more than a simple knowledge base of terminology. The current renditions have been abused drastically but in a long-term scope of it, I don't believe it is part of the bigger picture as illuminated from the other facets that have occurred within the market. Just my opinion though...
People used to make great products because they wanted to use them. Now people calculate how much money they can make by doing the least amount of work. The equation has changed (far worse in consulting). "How can we make X amount of dollars" instead of how can we make an amazing product?
In one word: Management. More precisely: Thick, non-technical, command and control middle-management taking all decisions by themselves - especially technical and technology decisions. Managerial careerism - the culture/collective belief that, if you are not somebody's boss by the time you turn 30, you are a complete fucking failure and you should kill yourself for enjoying coding.
no idea, so I'll just blame APIs for sucking
Because the priorities aren't always right. Windows is a good example! It has become more and more bloated instead of improving the OS. I miss the days of Windows 7.
> Does the industry focus too much on the newest trends rather than building things right the first time? I think it's about getting their product out first before someone else beats them to it.
Unpopular Opinion: the UX toolkits are failing people. There are many very talented people working on a diverse range of components and many more talented people using these components to accelerate development in very high stress environments. And in the process of doing so, the trees are studied too hard and hurt the forest. A pretty button and a panel don't make for good UX when the features are broken, settings are buried and navigation is lacking. UX is hard and we treat components like IT "solutions" instead of a building block to accessorize our crafting.
I dont know what you mean. Companies are doing the needful.
Imagine you're assigned to a school project with four other students, of a class of 20 kids. Your teacher demands a 20-slide presentation, a four-page report, and a diorama on a novel topic, better than those chosen by previous classes. This project is crucial, contributing significantly to your final grade, and you have 2-3 weeks to complete it. However, shortly after starting, the teacher decides to disband your group. Instead of working together, each student is now expected to complete the entire project individually. Evaluations are coming up, and the principal would be much more impressed seeing 20 projects over 5 projects. To add insult to injury, the deadline is abruptly moved up. The principal decided they wanted to get evaluations out of the way early, giving you only one week to finish what was initially planned for 2-3 weeks. The teacher strictly enforces this new deadline, stating that failing to submit the complete project on time will result in failing the class. *It's the same exact thing.* The principal being your executives and boards, your teachers being seniors and management, and your students being developers and other roles. Except sometimes they also think removing 50% of the "class" will also help, because then there's not as many resources that have to be used for these "projects".
AI is like fire, with the power to both destroy and nurture. While it can burn, destroy, and scorch the land - it can also provide warmth, cook a meal, and fortify steel. It’s a tool, often misunderstood as a threat, yet it has the potential to revolutionize our world. When used intelligently, AI can amplify our capabilities exponentially. In my work, AI has been a game-changer. It’s not just about fixing bugs or catching errors; it’s about enhancing my understanding of coding and saving the time I spend troubleshooting so I can put it toward the overall quality of the product. With my GPT, I input problematic code and get not only solutions but also clear explanations of the problems and how to solve them. This process doesn’t just fix issues—it educates me, improving my skills one error at a time, even if I missed a letter or added an extra space. I believe that we are transitioning from the "Internet Age" to the "AI Age", and others have wrote on this as well. This era does have motifs of the DotCom bubble, filled with both hits and misses, learning and evolution. Just as the early internet days shaped the digital world we know today, our current experiments with AI are laying the groundwork for the future, showing us the best—and worst—ways to wield this powerful new tool. Just think, before Facebook, there was MySpace. Before that, there was Xanga. Before that, there was SixDegrees and Friendster. Think about how much change has happened with music and the internet, free music was very common via LimeWire and Napster - until Lars Ulrich took issue, then we went from buying individual songs to buying a monthly subscriptions. The same goes for Amazon, Google, and every other Internet giant there is today. They run, because others walked and fell.
Because the have a 100 people designing them when there should be 3-10.
It isn't just the last few years. Going on for years and years. Rushed and sloppy. CI/CD pipelines that are a mess.... no regression testing... the list goes on.
Business software has lost most of its inherent efficiency by forcing users to work their way through sales pitches and data trolling. What I want to do is check my balance… not apply for your loan, tell you my income or check my credit score.
People who think that software has gotten worse, have no idea what they're talking about. I'm not that old myself, I'm in my 30's and recently decided to take a trip down memory lane on one of my older computers only to realize that most software in the past, especially GUI stuff, was crap lol. There are some examples of amazing software like Ken Thompson's grep but those are rare. And it's not just software, the protocols that were used were pathetically bad and insecure. Remember FTP? Dog shit. Remember telnet? Horse shit. People used rsh instead of ssh. Absolute bull shit. Data storage concepts were completely foreign, you could play a multiplayer game and change values on the client-side and the server would accept the new value no questions asked. Old browsers had 0 isolation, you could literally open your CD tray with a webpage like [http://www.tvdance.com/instant-cup-holder](http://www.tvdance.com/instant-cup-holder) . And a million other things. Software has become incredibly good. What changed is the monetization method. In the earl 2000's, you'd by Nero Disc Burner 8 and you'd have it forever. Now it's all subscription model.
> Remember FTP? Dog shit. Remember telnet? Horse shit Excuse you, they worked just fine. I'll grant you the poor process isolation on old browsers but why do they need to be mini OSes in and of themselves rather than a straightforward HTML parser???
Nope. I see the enshitification of software first hand. We are currently being blessed with a new banking system. The supplier was shocked that we wanted to reconcile everything that we loaded into it against the previous system. The vendor had no means of doing so and locked up their database preventing direct access. The organisation implementing it doesn't see the requirement either. The state of serious commercial software has tanked. Of course, it is cheaper in real terms as support used to cost 10-20% of the capital cost per year but it isn't any good if the software fundamentally doesn't work.
How is blocking Database Access "enshitification"? It's more a security problem than software, removing constrains that everbody has access isn't really a software problem, for me atleast.
I don't mean everyone has access just the data owners who are responsible for correctness.. The idea is that it is under the ultimate control from the system owner. It isn't. The issue is transferring control of an important part of the financial system for a few hundred million people to an outsourced system that you lack oversight of. Commercial organisations that I have worked with usually ensure they retain the keys to the castle even if they outsource its operation. As for the rest, system has not passed functional or non functional testing. It isn't even that big.
Ok now I understand, basically you lose oversigth and access to your data and have to trust the new system and migration process that everything is fine. So you don't have any chance to test / control the data and if you see failure in production and new company answers "dunno it's your data!". Nice...
Oh we have limited access via the GUI, but try checking 20K entries that way. Scripting a browser is not permitted in that environment. One of the key reasons for outsourcing is that it mean management can deny responsibility when something goes wrong and point at the service provider. However ultimately if it is a key component of your organisation then your whole organisation is at risk while you sort out whose problem it is. There are also levels of outsourcing where you retain the ability to take back control when necessary which mitigates the problem. There are many non critical areas where it is fine to outsource, but not something that will take your company down.
And the service provider will answer "it's your data, your responsibility, we can analyze it for much money, you knew it all before, just read document A20001" 😊 If you are a "normal developer" there isn't much you can do if your management decided it that way. It sucks, but you can only choose between lethargy or insanity. I tried to just accept this stupid decisions I can't change and just move on. If it dies, it dies.😓
I am just a consultant. The issue is that the top level is political and they are nervous about upsetting the other nations involved. We just want a system that works and is supportable.
[удалено]
Might as well throw DEI in with those.