I have used computers starting around the mid to early 1980s. The first computer I used was an Apple 2e. (actually it was wrote as Apple IIe)
I have built my own computers. I am the guy that people used to come and ask questions about computers and software. For the last several years developers have been insistant on making things harder and more complicated.
It just took 40 fucking minutes for me to turn on and transfer the data from 1 ipad to a new ipad.
How the hell do you the software developer make things that fucked up?
I do exactly what was asked and the damned (new) Ipad just keeps looping.
For the love of all that is good in this world, if you are the developer that thinks this shit is ok, find the tallest building on the planet and jump. There is no reason to make things this screwed up. I hate you just as much as I hate trump, and that is saying something.
There is nothing that this planet would lose if you were gone from it. I am so sick and tired of dealing with shit products.
this is the sad thing. I installed and am using linux mint and that is a dream compared to some of this garbage.
Why do you feel the need to make things that just plain suck? It isn’t just apple. It’s microsoft. It’s interfaces on other electronic items. Please just stop doing stupid shit. and if you aren’t capable of stopping the crappy way that you think. Just go flip burgers at McDonalds.
Edit: These others have said you’re right it’s managers and boards, but there are pheromonal developers also the same way they just don’t get it. But you are right the majority of the problem is the managers and the system that has been created.
the point is to make sure nothing like FOSS ever happens again
The example you provides is because managers/executives/shareholders demanded it, not because of software developers wanted it.
If it was easy and simple, then you wouldn’t pay for Apples genius bar to do it for you.
Even team leads and department heads have limited input on decisions that impact usability from and end users perspective.
I wont say software engineers never make things needlessly complicated, they do build things that are easy to understand from their perspective sometimes. Its also dramatically harder to make something complicated simple, and easy to make something simple complicated.
Tldr: people who do the actual work dont get a say. You’re getting mad at the McDonald’s employee for only giving you 2 sauce packets, instead of corporate for creating that policy.
The devs do get some say, but often propose (or “champion”) overcomplicated bullshit in the hopes of being promoted up the engineering chain. That’s why we used to have all these fuckers drawing diagrams with Kafka and Zookeeper supporting a service mesh (provided as a pod sidecar in Kubernetes) spraying events into a topic to be consumed by Flink etc. Usually it’s an internal service receiving 10 requests per hour, which could easily have been handled by a one-page Python program running on a Raspberry Pi. I don’t know if the utter hopelessness and death of craftsmanship caused by companies embracing LLM slopcoding has made all of that worse or dampened it.
Totally agree that a lot of bullshit requirements are mandated by execs though; even when they had their “we do Agile” masks on.
in the hopes of being promoted up the engineering chain
This is often also the fault of the rich assholes who control the money and don’t do any work.
I completely agree, my point was more about decisions impacting the end user (the the one OP referenced) are typically out of their control.
I’ve definitely experienced overcomplicated implementations like that (wfh is a life saver when I can turn off the camera so my face doesnt get me fired when some dev suggests something like that). I’ve also experienced a bunch where the engineer just isn’t managed and roped in, and comes up with something just because that thought it was interesting or to see if they could.
AI has been such a bizarre experience, I figured managers and people who dont actually write code anymore would love it, they boss the agents around just like their workers, but seeing some of these truly amazing engineers who use to block my PRs previously for the littlest hypothetical gold plated criticism now just spamming these 100+ change PRa that they literally cant defend because they didn’t even look at the code…its just disorientating.
Same here - nitpicky “I would have introduced a factory” reviewers embracing mass-scale slop has been a really jarring thing for me too. Like, I got into this industry because I started programming on the C64 and absolutely loved it… so I have no interest in giving up the thing I most enjoy. But did those nitpicky devs not also love writing code? Otherwise why would they hold up PRs for days/weeks over (usually) purely subjective preferences?
Tbh I’m having a hard time coming to terms with it all. People keep saying “use it or be left behind” - I think that’s what I want.
Exactly.
It makes sense when the people who got into programming because it was a well paying job with lots of benefits start going into the deep end with AI. Because they never actually wanted to write code or engineer anything in the first place, it was a means to an end.
But when the people who cared about their craft, and got into because they loved programing, when they completely drop all their high standards and give up writing or architecture anything, thats where I start feeling lost.
I really dont know what else I would do for a living. But im not sure how much longer I can stay professional dealing with all the slop PRs and short story length READMEs that dont actually tell you anything.
There’s a difference between getting in cause you love the craft and staying in because of the money and benefits even after your soul’s been crushed by the industry. AI is helping some of those devs just postpone becoming carpenters.
I’m a Software Engineer. I don’t chose what gets built. I get paid to build what someone else’s wants built. I do that so I can eat and stay sheltered.
For the love of all that is good in this world, if you are the developer that thinks this shit is ok, find the tallest building on the planet and jump. There is no reason to make things this screwed up. I hate you just as much as I hate trump, and that is saying something.
There is nothing that this planet would lose if you were gone from it. I am so sick and tired of dealing with shit products.
I don’t chose what gets built.
Yeah, this is definitely true. I’m the sort of software engineer who logs off after work and works on my own side projects for the passion of it. At work, I do what I can to advocate for better ways of doing things. Not just for customers, but just to keep the cognitive load manageable. But I definitely have to choose my battles. Battles with management and also battles with my coworkers who might think such-and-such super-heavy framework should be imported so they can use one three-line function that it provides.
As others already said the people actually making the software all this time had little to no autonomy over what they are making.
At any big company even the head of an engineering department is subservient to the latest powerpoint brainfart decided upon in a weekly meeting of the marketing and sales teams, if it impresses the executives they’re going to say “can you make it do this” and the expected answer is “yes and it will take about this long to do”. And then go back to their desk and start figuring out how to make it work.
It works this way because we’re a steeply wealth-sorted society and software developer money doesn’t buy you into the “having a say in the direction of the tech industry” class, not by a long shot, and especially not in 2026. If it even puts you in the “ever going to be able to actally retire” class it’s because you were already hanging onto the bottom of the investor class by the skin of your 401k.
I’m a software engineer and I can say it’s a huge systemic issue in the whole software industry. (I wouldn’t want to speak to the hardware industry given how little experience I have with it.) Part of the problem is managers. They think more features is better.
A good example is Java web development. (Not directly relevant to your story about iPads, but it’s an example I’m familiar with.) Java 1.0 was released in 1995. In 1996, they released a framework for doing web development in Java called “Servlets”. They definitely made some terrible design decisions when they made Servlets. (The use of XML for configuration. JSPs being impossible to render to strings. The near impossibility of writing your own “Servlet container”. Etc.) But it worked. And many of the issues with it were products of the time and only became apparently “mistakes” a decade later or more.
When people started realizing those were mistakes, they abandoned Servlets and built something bett- just kidding, they built a new layer of way-overengineered bullshit on top of Servlets called “Spring”. It became the industry standard for Java web development. So then in order to do web development in Java, you have to understand both Spring and Servlets. Actually, no you don’t. You just have to be able to throw shit at the wall and enlist the help of the guy who does understand both Spring and Servlets and isn’t afraid to look at the source code of both to figure out why they don’t act as advertised.
Well, of course, that wasn’t good enough. “It’s too cumbersome.” “I have to type too many things.” In true Java fashion, they added another janky floor to the house on the crumbling foundation. “Spring Boot”. It sits on top of Spring and configures a bunch of stuff “aUtOmAgIcAlLy” for you. But if you change the tiniest thing, you better just plan for days of dependency hell trying to get it to JUST COMPILE YOU MOTHERFUCKER.
Java sucks ass in every way and I hate writing Java. But if I have to write Java, I’d rather just use Servlets directly than the house of cards the industry has built on top of it any day. For all its warts, at least it does what you tell it and nothing more. Not to say there are no better alternatives not built on Servlets. But there’s no need for anything on top of Servlets. Any attempt at such could only make things worse.
(Ok. One exception. If I could get Servlets except you can eschew XML with the absolute minimum amount of moving parts strictly necessary to make that happen, I think that would improve Servlets. Also, I’d try to find an alternative to JSPs.)
That’s far from the only example in the Java ecosystem. Java’s just addicted to adding layers of complexity to “fix” the layers underneath.
Outside the Java ecosystem, there are similar issues in a lot of other communities. JS and Ruby developers are known to pull in tons of heavy dependencies without considering the consequences, for instance. C++ is so complex that development teams have to choose a common subset of the language to get anything done.
peak to me was just before the 20teens. like you could buy a mac wireless and macbook and a hard drive and all your stuff would get backedup and all you really had to do is plug a few things in. Nothing from that time got any easier and actually it kinda went backward,.
Yeah, starting probably 2005. Everything just started getting worse.
