I have been saying this for a decade. Technology is getting worse as a whole. Hardware is continuing to improve, but the software is getting worse at a faster rate, making the overall product suck more.
One of the reasons is the whole "software is a gas" thing. As long as there is faster hardware, more memory, more storage, software will get slower, more bloated, and take up more space, just because a gas always fills its container.
But another reason is there's more people in tech who don't know what they're doing. More people who took a bootcamp and jumped into a job, or came from some other career and barely know how to use a computer, never used Linux/UNIX. Some newer roles have very specific niches, where they don't know much about tech, and then they're asked to write code, which they have almost no idea how to do. I've recently worked with colleagues who were contributing code, and getting in the way of building the product, who shouldn't have been within 10 miles of an IDE. And when the senior developers don't know how environment variables work, I weep.
The newest generations of children can barely read and write let alone use a computer.
It’s going to be fascinating watching what happens when there’s nobody left capable of updating things like linux. It will be like a black box, people can maybe scrape together an electron app but they don’t go any deeper.
> when the senior developers don't know how environment variables work, I weep
I recently spent a hair-pulling near-week encountering then trying to figure out the DLL search path in Win32 because a library was messing around with it. Documentation is straightforward enough, I suppose, until you get to SetDefaultDllDirectories, which has this in its discussion: "It is not possible to revert to the standard DLL search path or remove any directory specified with SetDefaultDllDirectories from the search path."
I guess my point is, environment variables can be tricky.
I resign myself to let things be terrible. Leadership won't care to fix it until it becomes a problem for them, and that won't happen if I'm running around trying to plug the holes in the dyke. Since it's a big paycheck I stay and mentally check out, casually searching for something better.
One of the reasons is the whole "software is a gas" thing. As long as there is faster hardware, more memory, more storage, software will get slower, more bloated, and take up more space, just because a gas always fills its container.
But another reason is there's more people in tech who don't know what they're doing. More people who took a bootcamp and jumped into a job, or came from some other career and barely know how to use a computer, never used Linux/UNIX. Some newer roles have very specific niches, where they don't know much about tech, and then they're asked to write code, which they have almost no idea how to do. I've recently worked with colleagues who were contributing code, and getting in the way of building the product, who shouldn't have been within 10 miles of an IDE. And when the senior developers don't know how environment variables work, I weep.