Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?

I have been in the workforce for almost 30 years now and I believe that everybody is getting more squeezed so they don’t have the time or energy to do a proper job. The expectation is to get it done as quickly as possible and not do more unless told so.

In SW development in the 90s I had much more time for experimentation to figure things out. In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks.

I think google had it right for a while with their 20% time where people could do wanted to do. As far as I know that’s over.

People need some slack if you want to see good work. They aren’t machines that can run constantly on 100% utilization.

> I have been in the workforce for almost 30 years now and I believe that everybody is getting more squeezed so they don’t have the time or energy to do a proper job. The expectation is to get it done as quickly as possible and not do more unless told so.

That's my impression as well, but I'd stress that this push is not implicit or driven by metrics or Jira. This push is sold as the main trait of software projects, and what differentiates software engineering from any other engineering field.

Software projects are considered adaptable, and all projects value minimizing time to market. This means that on paper there is no requirement to eliminate the need to redesign or reimplement whole systems or features. Therefore, if you can live with a MVP that does 70% of your requirements list but can be hacked together in a few weeks, most would not opt to spend more man months only to get minor increments. You'd be even less inclined to pay all those extra man months upfront if you can quickly get that 70% in a few weeks and from that point onward gradually build up features.