This is my first post here, I’ve been lurking on this forum for a while, and I know everyone is so nice and welcoming here, but I can’t help but feel a bit like I don’t quite fit in, since I’m relatively new to systems programming and there are times where the topics discussed fly right over my head.
This talk resonated so much with how I’ve been feeling for the last few years. My path in tech has been unexpected, I started as a teenager doing web stuff, then somehow found myself writing mobile apps for fun, and when it was time to get a job, that’s the field where I landed.
I’ve been for years very comfortable writing software for Apple Platforms. While I’m no longer a fan of the way Apple works as a company and the software it produces, I can say that I felt very positive about the kind of software I have been building. I think a lot of it comes down to being in teams that cared, but also benefiting from many Apple-provided tools to solve problems that are usually an after-thought (take Accessbility as an example).
I think at some point, the consulting company I worked for realized that our clients weren’t willing to pay for the long iteration times of native mobile applications and their conclusion was that we would move on as a company and focus on what the clients wanted. With that decision, the company moved us upwards one abstraction layer, and we were now writing React Native apps since every company wanted that as a stack because they ship faster.
Business started booming, the quality of what we produced degraded more and more. We went from relying on the tools provided by the OSs stable SDK, to relying on countless NPM packages to do the most basic things. Users on older devices would open support tickets complaining that the apps they have always used now struggled to run, or sometimes didn’t work at all.
My colleagues that have been around the company for a long time, felt powerless, there was nothing one could do to improve things without challenging management or the paying customer.
For the last few years, I’ve been part of software I’m not proud of, from time to time I get the energy and willingness to improve things, be it by making it a topic I discuss with management or by asking for forgiveness later.
But the reality is that I feel pretty much stuck, since I need my job to pay my bills. But at the same time I really don’t like where things are going and I feel personally responsible for allowing such quality degradation.
Every company I worked since, had the same attitude, a problem or improvement is not worth being tackled unless it causes enough business harm. The problem is that when incidents happen, all the stress of the work not done comes all at once with unreasonable urgency, and this sucks a lot of my hope for my future in this industry.
I have been making an attempt to move on, trying to get my love for computers back. But it has been really draining and sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it.
Oh well, sorry for the rant, just felt like sharing. Great talk! I really enjoy these humanist talks, might not be everyone’s cup of tea but Andrew’s “In Defense of the Free Software Movement” talk is also one of those talks I keep going back to, really inspiring.