I think we only got to this point because of a near-complete erosion of personal responsibility

  - 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

so given that we've been on autopilot to a vibe-coding wonderland for quite some time, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that we've reached the promised land.

▲ AnimalMuppet 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> 'industry standard best practices' win over a well designed bespoke solution every time, developers are just expected to write a little glue at most

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.

	▲	ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> 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. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/addendum-a-server-setup/

▲ ChrisMarshallNY 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sadly, I have to agree. I was fortunate to work for a company that absolutely insisted that I take full personal Responsibility and Accountability for my work.

I was there for almost 27 years, so had plenty of time to deal with the consequences of my decisions.

They were insane about Quality, so testing has always been a big part of my work, and still is, though I haven't been at that company for eight years.

▲ readthenotes1 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"agile and devops both conspire to treat developers as replaceable standins "

There is a lot of irony in that since the first plank of the agile manifesto is to put individuals in interactions first.

And I noticed you put the development process/structure first over the people who want to treat people as fungible.

	▲	ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Well, to be fair, there's what I call "pure" Agile (as in the Manifesto), and then "real-world Agile" (what has the name, but doesn't really seem to follow the Manifesto). I always liked the Manifesto, but it's really rather vague, and we engineers don't do "vague" so well, which leaves a lot of room for interpretation. And authors. And consultants. And conference speakers. Those are the ones that form what is eventually implemented. I'm not really sure any of the original signatories ever rolled up their sleeves, and worked to realize their vision. It's my experience, that this is where the wheels start to come off the grand ideas. That's one thing that I have to hand to Grady Booch. He came up with the idea, wrote it down, and then started to actually make tools to make it happen. Not sure if they really launched, but he did work to make his ideas into reality.