There's definitely a silver lining in that being a software engineer at a normal-ish company feels more satisfying now. Being more focused and KPI-driven has some upsides.
Some pressure to ship and to work on the things your customers actually need keeps you honest. It's satisfying to work on things which make a short term difference to the bottom line because you know at least someone cares. In contrast to working on a speculative side project which may never see the light of day.
I've come to believe this is just a legitimate personality difference. I really struggle to find joy when I'm working on something that I question the usefulness of. But I've worked with many people who find the work itself joyful and don't mind that at all.
That's not my problem at all. I can't work on something I don't see as useful, that's the whole reason I started programming in the first place. But building useful things is not what most software companies are up to these days, far from it.
Working at larger companies during zirp seemed high risk because the odds of getting stuck on a company side project were high. I was always wondering "is my team actually doing enough to not get fired?"
That seems to be happening less now. It's easier to know where you stand.
Yeah, worrying about getting fired isn't very helpful.
But selling out isn't either.
Programmers should be left enough space to do their thing well, that's the only way to build great software. Which was the entire point of Agile before it was corrupted into Scrum.
Hmm, is the argument that it's a generational problem?
Maybe it is, but I find it strange that nobody seems to care that visiting a page downloads 100s of MBs of packages that clogs the browser. Or, that latencies in backend replies can go into multiple 10s of seconds, etc.
Back in the day, we had to make sure the software ran on less performant computers and we painstakingly analyzed memory allocations and checking the run times of requests, etc. We also had to make sure that the software baked onto CDs worked, there was no multi GB downloads after install possible.
I, for one, would still like that to be the case for the software I use and would still prefer to have the time to do this for the projects I work on.
Well, not OP, but there's definite degradation in software quality and attention to detail.
Some is due to Scrum. It's actually not the fault of the methodology but that it's been half implemented by companies that did waterfall before. You are expected to finish a feature in a sprint, but you have no connection to speak to the stakeholders/customers.
The other things are these KPIs, and unsurprisingly, the bean counters behind them don't care about refactoring or addressing tech debt.
In a sense, yes, we need to focus on delivering value but it's much more chaotic now, so it's very difficult to deliver performant features that deliver also what was expected.
There's no appreciation of skills anymore, of quality; it's all about generating features as effectively as possible. No room for creativity/trial and error.
It's like working at a factory, pushing a button as fast as humanly possible.
And coders are treated like button pushers as a consequence.
