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Updated at 2021-11-28
I have recently stumbled upon Software Disenchantment by Nikita Tonsky. He expresses some frustration with the disregard of performance (or overall quality) in software development. He delves into the reasons in Good Times Create Weak Men, which - if I understood him correctly - revolve around hype-driven development and twisted business priorities.
I work in a complex, evil enterprise. OMI was our monitoring tool of choice for quite a while, and it was useless at some point because it was flooded with non-removable unimportant messages. The messages were physically removable, of course, but the ability to filter them out was buried under a mountain of bureaucratic work that was obviously piled for someone's job security.
The corporate's solution? Dump OMI completely, replace it with Splunk and a bunch of custom scripts written for Telegraf and Collectd by a couple of unskilled workers. Needless to say, it worked horrendously. Seems like the Splunk marketing team sold my executives a magical solution to the imaginary handcuffs they trapped themselves in.
How is that fun for anyone? Tricking people into buying your product even though it clearly doesn't fit the customer. Bumping your sales count up so you put that on your resume so you get to make more luxurious scams that you later put in your resume.
Not to mention my executives, who sign contracts with the trendiest companies and bother their workers with integrating the trendiest product to solve easy problems.
How is this fulfilling? I can't imagine being an elder, looking back on my life and feeling content with manipulating people into buying as much shit as possible. This cannot possibly be a working economic model. This is depressing.
I love tech fiddling as much as the next junkie, and I find coming up with simple solutions to cute problems to be the most satisfying kind of fiddling. I don't get off of building complex systems, quite the opposite. Trimming down unused code, golfing spaghetti into clean, pretty, and documented code is what gets me going. Optimising my Emacs or Sway setup. That's fun! Complex systems just feel pretentious, you feel me?
