I feel as if a lot of multipliers have happened that he didn't anticipate, but I also feel as if the culture of software engineering has kind of decomposed, since his day.
We seem to be getting a lot of fairly badly-done work out the door, very quickly, these days.
- agile and devops both conspire to treat developers as replaceable standins
- we're not even really expected to hang around and see the consequences of our decisions
- on arriving in a new organization, we're presented with a heap of trash we're asked to just sort of keep it running, certainly not to fix it
- 'industry standard best practices' win over a well designed bespoke solution every time, developers are just expected to write a little glue at most
- managers aren't expected to know anything about the domain at all, but to track people to make sure they did what they said they were going to
- speed to feature is the only metric. instability can be papered over with bodies
- we pretty much stopped systemic testing a couple decades ago
Sometimes for good reason. "Well designed bespoke solutions" often turn out to be badly designed reinventions of the wheel. Industry standard best practices sometimes prevent problems that you yet know you will run into.
And sometimes they just are massively overdesigned overkill. There is a real art to knowing which is which.
Absolutely, but that “art” is really important, and also, fairly rare.
Many folks just jam in any dependency that is a first hit in a search, with more than 50 GH stars, and a shiny Web site.
One “red flag” phrase that I’ve learned is “That’s a solved problem!”. When I hear that, I know I should be skeptical of the prescribed “solution.”
That said, there’s stuff that definitely should be delegated to better-qualified folks. One example, that I was just working on[0], is Webauthn stuff.