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752 points dceddia | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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0xbadcafebee ◴[] No.36448924[source]
I have been saying this for a decade. Technology is getting worse as a whole. Hardware is continuing to improve, but the software is getting worse at a faster rate, making the overall product suck more.

One of the reasons is the whole "software is a gas" thing. As long as there is faster hardware, more memory, more storage, software will get slower, more bloated, and take up more space, just because a gas always fills its container.

But another reason is there's more people in tech who don't know what they're doing. More people who took a bootcamp and jumped into a job, or came from some other career and barely know how to use a computer, never used Linux/UNIX. Some newer roles have very specific niches, where they don't know much about tech, and then they're asked to write code, which they have almost no idea how to do. I've recently worked with colleagues who were contributing code, and getting in the way of building the product, who shouldn't have been within 10 miles of an IDE. And when the senior developers don't know how environment variables work, I weep.

replies(3): >>36450706 #>>36451899 #>>36453811 #
1. placesalt ◴[] No.36453811[source]
> when the senior developers don't know how environment variables work, I weep

I recently spent a hair-pulling near-week encountering then trying to figure out the DLL search path in Win32 because a library was messing around with it. Documentation is straightforward enough, I suppose, until you get to SetDefaultDllDirectories, which has this in its discussion: "It is not possible to revert to the standard DLL search path or remove any directory specified with SetDefaultDllDirectories from the search path."

I guess my point is, environment variables can be tricky.