> The responses vary but often take the form of reused cliches of which some don't even directly apply.

"It has been tested by a 1000 people before me"

"What if there is an upstream optimisation?"

"I'm just here to focus on Business Problems™"

"It reduces cognitive load"

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Whilst I think you are exaggerating, I do recognise this phenomenon. For me, it was during the pandemic when I had to train / support a lot of bootcamp grads and new entrants to the career. They were anxious to perform in their new career and interpreted that as shipping tickets as fast as possible.

These developers were not dumb but they had... like, no drive at all to engage with problems. Most programmers should enjoy problems, not develop a kind of bad feeling behind the eyes, or a tightness in their chest. But for these folks, a problem was a threat, of a bad status update at their daily Scrum.

Dependencies are a socially condoned shortcut to that. You can use a library and look like a sensible and pragmatic engineer. When everyone around you appears to accept this as the norm, it's too easy to just go with the flow.

I think it is a change in the psychological demographic too. This will sound fanciful. But tech used to select for very independent, stubborn, disagreeable people. Now, agreeableness is king. And what is more agreeable than using dependencies?

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austin-cheney 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The two I hear the most are:

reinventing the wheel

some comparison to assembly

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12_throw_away 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> They were anxious to perform in their new career and interpreted that as shipping tickets as fast as possible. [...].. they had like, no drive at all to engage with problems

To be honest, I think these programmers understood their jobs perfectly here. Their bosses view programmers as commodities, are not concerned with robustness, maintainability, or technical merit - they want a crank they can turn that spits out features.

	▲	jbreckmckye 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think you are right. Those feature factory teams were the ones hiring as fast as they could; they didn't need to filter on programming fundamentals; and they could exploit the anxiety of junior developers who sensed the market was becoming competitive.

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notmyjob 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Not sure about “agreeableness” but I can see group think and disagreeableness to anything that falls outside of the group think. Cargo cult coding isn’t a new thing but the demographic shift you note is real. But is that not just the commodification of programming labor?