Human beings are ephemeral. They're born, they die.
Everything human beings create is ephemeral. That restaurant you love will gradually drop standards and decay. That inspiring startup will take new sources of funding and chase new customers and leave you behind, on its own trajectory of eventual oblivion.
When I frame things this way, I conclude that it's not that "software quality" is collapsing, but the quality of specific programs and companies. Success breeds failure. Apple is almost 50 years old. Seems fair to stipulate that some entropy has entered it. Pressure is increasing for some creative destruction. Whose job is it to figure out what should replace your Apple Calculator or Spotify? I'll put it to you that it's your job, along with everyone else's. If a program doesn't work, go find a better program. Create one. Share what works better. Vote with your attention and your dollars and your actual votes for more accountability for big companies. And expect every team, org, company, country to decay in its own time.
Shameless plug: https://akkartik.name/freewheeling-apps
Ecclesiastes 1:2-5
Jeremiah 29:11-12
Agreed, but If I can add one more angle: creative destruction is strangled when engineers are glued to the Internet about “how software should be built.”
I've published a blog post urging [0] top programmers to quit for‑profit social media and rebuild better norms away from that noise.
[0] https://abner.page/post/exit-the-feed/
To add to this, many of the things we consider "high quality" are labors of love of 2 people. Many things we consider low quality are built by massive organizations and hundreds of developers each trying to ship one feature, get promoted, or find another job.
The more elaborate your design doc for printing hello world is, the higher the chances for L+1
My hot take is that quality is inversely proportional to income. The more someone is paying for something, the more bloodsucking mercenaries are attracted to it that have less consideration for the quality of the output than for their own enrichment. (A corollary to this is that the more a job pays the more it will suck: the only way they can get people to come help and keep them there is to offer high compensation).
Look at trappist brewers. Long tradition of consistent quality. You just have to devote your life to the ascetic pursuit of monkhood. It attracts a completely different kind of person.
It's certainly a provocative thought. But I think it's too blunt. In our commercial world sometimes the cheaper thing works better and sometimes the more expensive thing works better. So the lesson I take away is that price is not a great signal in the absence of other context. Trappist brewers have some other cultural norms going for them, and the focus should be on those norms rather than price. The people attracted to it aren't thinking much about the money. If you value them, why would you?
[flagged]
As others have stated here, I think there’s this constant push for features and not enough investment in improving reliability, observability, scalability. Of course, there is a lot of context required to make actual conclusions.
At many large companies, there is an incentive to create systems that are as complicated as possible. A side effect of that is gaps in what’s actually observable. This manifests itself in shitty user experiences with partially loading pages and widgets or widgets that take multiple times longer to load than other parts of the page.
All this is a direct result of large company barriers in communication, crossing between stacks with no single vertical observability solution. At medium sized companies (<9000), it begins to fall apart. A single user request has dozens of internal hops to arrive at the final API and product managers wonder why a response takes several seconds.