Why is modern software so bad?

The author fails to support the thesis that “modern software is so bad.” A handful of anecdotes, some speculation about how software development quality might suffer, and the usual analysis with the benefit of hindsight and the implication that a better developer or manager wouldn’t have made mistakes.

Adobe Creative Suite crashing sounds annoying but no one dies when that happens. Nothing blows up. I have servers with 3+ years of uptime, running web apps that add value to businesses, reliably, all day long. I can’t remember the last time a computer or phone crashed and lost a file or hours of my work. I can talk to my phone and have it navigate my car. Does it matter that the navigation code has some bloat or technical debt or could have been better if it was written in Rust or Clojure? It beats paper maps and asking for directions even if it’s not 100% perfect.

Modern software literally runs almost everything. Phones, cars, TVs, airplanes, social media, banking, infrastructure, etc. Every web site, every server, all running software written by regular people. It mostly works well enough — actually a lot better than I would expect given what I know about software development. Why can’t we take some pride in our profession and express satisfaction that anything works as well as it does rather than constantly griping that the profession and the world are not perfect (for our own value of perfect)?

I can’t think of another profession where relatively well-paid professionals have so much freedom and creative latitude, but constantly complain about their tools, their bosses, their company, their co-workers. And many of us (programmers) do that even though we are surrounded by evidence that most software that anyone uses at all mostly works well enough and adds enough value for companies and customers to pay for it.

We get $100 - $200k/year to do something a lot of us find fun and interesting, then go home and write a blog post about how our managers don’t care about technical debt, or how our co-workers are “doing it wrong.” I’ve been writing code for 40 years and I still enjoy solving problems and getting “thanks” from customers and users. I’m not going to flagellate myself because I had to use PHP or take some shortcuts because the business had other priorities besides my perfectionism.

Good software isn't significantly more valuable than mediocre software in many applications, provided the main job gets done.

Everything else is a downstream effect of that.

Software is a product of the society, and modern society sucks badly.

It’s because of the extreme amount of contracting, outsourcing, and in general “I don’t care how our developers or admins feel, we can always hire more”. This stuff is all incredibly for profit and the software getting worse isn’t going to change that much. (I think “so bad” is a level we haven’t reached yet, right now we are at “janky”)

I think there is also no willingness to change this. People cash out, aren’t concerned about anyone else needing to use something or any major impacts changes will have beyond profit generating or profit saving.

Maybe convince the companies that having good software is more profitable than mediocre software and industry dominance.