Dirty Little Secret

At the beginning of this Century, an incredibly successful software executive turned to me and said, “The dirty little secret of the software industry is that none of this stuff works.”

I was horrified.

"Sure, some of that really ancient stuff didn’t work very well, but that is why we are going to replace it all with all of our flashy new technologies. Our new stuff will definitely fix that and work properly."

I’ve revisited this conversation in my head dozens of times over the decades. That new flashy stuff of my youth is now the ancient crusty stuff for the kids. It didn’t work either.

Well, to be fair, some parts of it worked just enough, and a lot of it stayed around hidden deep below. But it's weird and eclectic, and people complain about it often, try hard to avoid it, and still dream of replacing it.

History, it seems, did a great job of proving that the executive was correct. Each new generation piles another mess on top of all of the previous messes, with the dream of getting it better, this time.

It’s compounded by the fact that people rush through the work so much faster now.

In those days, we worked on something for ‘months’, now the expectation is ‘weeks’.

Libraries and frameworks were few and far between, but that actually afforded us a chance to gain more knowledge and be more attentive to the little details. The practice of coding software keeps degrading as the breadth of technologies explodes.

The bigger problem is that even though the hardware has advanced by orders and orders of magnitude, the effectiveness of the software has not. It was screens full of awkward widgets back then; it is still the same. Modern GUIs have more graphics, but behave worse than before. You can do more with computers these days, but it is far more cognitively demanding to get it done now. We didn’t improve the technology; we just started churning it out faster.

Another dirty little secret is that there is probably a much better way to code things that was probably more commonly known when it was first discovered in the 70s or the 80s. Most programmers prefer to learn from scratch, forcing them to resolve the same problems people had decades ago. If we keep reinventing the same crude mechanics, it is no surprise that we haven’t advanced at all. We keep writing the same things over and over again while telling ourselves that this time it is really different.

I keep thinking back to all of those times, in so many meetings, were someone was enthusiastically expounding the virtues of some brand new, super trendy, uber cool technology, and essentially claiming “this time, we got it right”, while knowing, that I wait for another five years, the tides will turn and a new generation will be claiming that that old stuff doesn’t work.

“None of this stuff really works” got stuck in my head way back then, and it keeps proving itself correct.