My view is that the reason so many younger developers are making such foolish choices -- LLM usage, text editors instead of grown-up tools, and others that will likely make some of my respondents even angrier than those two -- is because they are up and coming in a trade that has been grotesquely malformed by sitting on a money-printing machine for 45 years.
Performance, productivity, precision, none of these things matter when your organization owns a money-printing machine.
Most of these folks, and most of their seniors, and most of their managers, and most of their corporate sponsors have never experienced a situation in which excellence is rewarded at a rate particularly better than gross mediocrity is rewarded.
In truth, I have only experienced that a handful of times in my 45 year career as a professional developer.
But I, and I'm sure many others, tho by no means even a tenth of the trade's folks, have been intrinsically driven.
Without that intrinsic drive for excellence, the sad truth is that they're right: professional excellence simply does not matter to their shareholders.
One might wonder, I certainly have, how much longer the trade can continue like this.
I do not know.
I believe the answer is actually intimately tangled with the question of whether the people of the world will continue to desire serfdom to extractive capitalist mega-corporations.
And, I confess, naivete or optimism or stupidity, I didn't actually think the will-to-serfdom would go on this long.
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social
I'm wondering here ... ISTM ... just riffing here ...
ISTM that excellence is by definition rare. Every successful system (plant, animal, species, any complex system) succeeds not because of its most excellent elements, but because its mediocre elements are good enough.
Maybe what we, you and I, care about really doesn't matter to success, not because of extractive capitalism, bad as it is, or the like, but because excellence, by its nature, is just a lovely irrelevance.
1/2
@GeePawHill@mastodon.social
That might not even be bad. As we both know, striving for excellence is its own reward, quite often its only reward.
But it is a reward. You know, as I do, the joy of making.
I suspect that that joy, and the joy of sharing, of once in a while sparking someone ... might be what it's all about.
Mediocre works. It has to work. It's a fundamental law of complex systems (that I just identified).
2/3
@RonJeffries@mastodon.social @GeePawHill@mastodon.social “Mediocre works” is, I suspect, an element of the truism “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets”.
And if the results the system gets through mediocrity are good enough…boom 💥
Which is precisely the reason LLMs might just succeed in killling off software development-they might be “good enough” mediocre.
Which I find depressing as hell having strived to raise the bar and make a difference my entire career.
@thirstybear@agilodon.social
If I may…
“Excellent” and “mediocre” are subjective and relative. They are aesthetic judgements, based on some set of preferred criteria. Otherwise, not disagreeing.
The reason that “mediocre” software—bloated, buggy, insecure—succeeds is that the competitive market landscape is characterized by winner-take-all. Upstarts get strangled in their cribs, if they are born at all.
The software ecosystem is not healthy. It has similarities to industrial agriculture.
@RonJeffries@mastodon.social @GeePawHill@mastodon.social
GeePawHill
