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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

It's just "Enterprise Software Development" which is stuck in the Dark Ages, always has been, always will be. All the progress, and generally "cool stuff" happens elsewhere (in research labs in the 70s, on home computers in the 80's, in PC games and hardware in the 90's, on game consoles in the 00's and so on...). It's just not obvious today that many startups are also trapped in "Enterprise Hell", because they want to be the next Amazon or Google. All IMHO of course and probably slightly exaggerated.

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I think this is a pretty good take. Corporate management hell changes its name and window dressing over the years - in this generation it's called "Agile" - but, it's always the same, and needs to boil down to: micromanagement, sapping individual autonomy and initiative, and homogenizing developers until they fit a mold that can be line-replaceable.

Honestly, I think the worst part of the self delusion. If you are consciously making the trade off with your eyes wide open and the data to back it up, then sure. That's not what i observe though. I see people who honestly don't see what they are doing wrong, and why their developers aren't making awesome stuff that will make them competitive.

They actually think they are doing everything right.

I started this account when I realized that was what is happening at my current job.

I've been trying to ask for some of the things this suggests, and been told that it's a 'low value use of my time' to have expensive developers talk to cheap service reps.

The entire point of my work is to multiply the value those low cost reps provide. I'm probably deluding myself to hope that will improve their working conditions, but even just eliminating the day to day pain points of their job is more motivating to me than whatever "move this widget 1px to the right cause the design isn't pixel perfect on the CEOs new phone with a strange resolution" type crap I wind up working on.

I frequently think of the brain drain, wherein many people who would have gone on to advance science and technology instead end up having to explain to some ad person why you can't have a "mirror" color on your monitor, in the vein of the first fifty quotes on the old ClientCopia site.

The Enterprise is also put through hell when the developers care more about cool technology than building good tools that empowers the company itself to succeed.

I see it all the time devs off-roading a relatively simple project to try out the latest tech. It always ends up taking much longer and leaves behind a mountain of technical debt.

That's ok though they'll leave in 6 months to go wreck havoc on another company's code base.

Many times they use new tech because they want to leave, and using new tech helps you find a new job. A good way to fix this problem is therefore to make your engineers not want to leave.

People forget that most useful software comes from startups that either become big or get bought out. In these startups, spaghetti code is the norm. They don't have the people, time, or product knowledge to do it right the first time. It falls on the larger entity to eventually clean it up.

The larger entity being who exactly?

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