Software Development Issues

Over on Quora, I found this rant by a former software developer, describing why he went to another line of work. I look forward to seeing responses.

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The industry never learns. Projects today are failing for the exact same reasons as they failed in the 1970s. Bad management, bad planning, bad resource allocation, unrealistic deadlines, constant scope creep, insufficiently understood domains, improperly trained developers working on vague fluffy work instructions that are either woefully over-simplified; or bear no relation to the actual business problem they are supposedly solving

So they designed (by committee, naturally) Yet Another Methodology to overcome these systemic failures. And called it Agile. And yeah, that was pretty much it for me, I think that was the point where after 20 years as a paid developer and 30-odd years as a hobbyist I simply gave up. Agile is a disaster for the industry. I’ve had a couple of years away from development now, but in the back of my mind there’s a near-certainty that in maybe 2-3 years or so there’s going to be a mahoosive pile of projects that will all crash and burn. Because of Agile. And then maybe the call will go out for grizzled old veterans to dust off their keyboards and come out of retirement to clean up the mess…

Tech churn -- look, this isn’t really getting us anywhere. Especially in web development. Have we really moved all that far ahead in the last 10–15 years? I was working on a huge commercial project with a very complex Ext.js front end calling an asynchronous REST API about 10 years ago that was the equal if not superior to anything I’ve seen recently from the Angular/React/Node ecosystem. This "Javascript Framework Of The Week" Holy War nonsense has to stop. Holy Wars in general have to stop, the industry is riddled with them, and each of them is even more Stupid than the last.

Antisocial hours stuck in a box with antisocial people -- sorry guys and gals but stereotypes often exist for a reason. So the endemic appallingly bad project management from #1 and #2 leads to crazy hours, constant crisis mode, endless firefighting, late-night and all-weekend hackathons to stop the world from exploding, again. And maybe this wouldn’t be too bad if your work colleagues were….I dunno, a bit more human? I’ve worked in too many IT shops where actual spoken communication and other forms of normal human social interaction were almost non-existent, and when interaction did happen it wasn’t pleasant. I’ve worked in hospitality jobs where the hours are crazy and the stress levels high, but which were actually preferable to being a developer cos at least your workmates were people who tried to get through the 14-hour-shift with a bit of a sense of fun.

This might sound silly but after a few decades it does get you down….how nobody has a clue what you actually do, how your job is often sneeringly dismissed with a “he does something in computers”, how you can’t seem to talk about work to non-IT friends, yet the rest of the group have no trouble relating to one another’s tales across a very diverse set of jobs, the way people’s eyes glaze over immediately when they ask you what you do, and how everybody assumes that because you “work in IT” you will cheerfully give up your Saturday evening to fix their printer. It’s actually quite weird that a job that is so well known, well paid, and so fundamental to how a modern society functions….is simultaneously so misunderstood, disliked and misinterpreted. That I don’t miss at all.

The INSANE recruitment practices that are endemic these days. 4 and 5 rounds of interviews. Bonkers whiteboard tests on some weird problem nobody would ever have to tackle in the real world. Being expected to reel off some description of a function from the manual, or reel off some academic technical case from a degree you finished 15 years ago. Being expected to spend the weekend writing functioning code which is often a sneaky way to get a bug fixed for free. Hyper-aggressive questioning in interviews…often from people who clearly have never written a line of code in their lives. Job descriptions that are ludicrous demanding things like more years of experience in a technology stack than the tech has even existed, some crazy mix of technologies that it is hugely unlikely any real person would ever have come across, demanding that potential applicants be proficient in everything from server sysadmin to being the DBA to writing the back-end API to being a UI graphics whizz…and then offering to pay less than any one of those roles would have got 10 years ago…

Now I get it, there are huge numbers of chancers out there, lots and lots of “developers” who are mediocre to downright awful. But really there has to be a better way to find competent devs than this omnishambles. I actually think current recruitment practices are making the problem WORSE as IMO this nonsense is actively weeding out normal sane productive people who actually understand not just the code but the business issues, leaving only supremely-confident bluffers or people who are quite frankly weird…