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Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

I mean it doesn't help that the developer class has a giant incentive not to make things that last

incentives tend to follow other incentives. As noted above, the best way in the industry most of the time is to move companies to get better compensation, and sometimes better workplace conditions as well. Companies don't incentivize people staying around. At bigger companies sometimes - not always though - you can make progress in these areas by getting promoted, however that only works for N percent of a workforce at any given place.

If companies incentivized retention with realistic paths to better compensation and growing your career, they'd see lower turn over with these systems.

There's a reason that in recent times there were newsworthy stories about companies giving out retention bonuses and salary increases when some sticks started to plateau / lose value (and therefore RSUs not retaining value), because its relatively rare

That's making a giant assumption that the employer considers software development to be a core operation in their business. For a lot of companies, paying for software is like paying for a copier - you buy the thing to sit in the office, maybe you pay for X years of maintenance, and when it stops working you buy another one. Maybe at a business with tons of copiers you'll have staff trained in how to maintain and repair them internally, but that's never going to be considered a core operation.

A lot of businesses treat software like copiers; they don't want to build it (because they don't consider themselves "tech"). And for a lot of the developers that make or maintain this software, there is little incentive to build it to last.

That's exactly my point. They don't have an incentive structure so that it is not treated like copiers. We are definitely on the same page here, in that sense. When I can only get 6% increases in a year to my base compensation by staying at a place and get 10, 20 sometimes even 30 % by leaving for a competitor doing a similar job, the calculus isn't hard, all things being relatively equal.

This is just an unfortunate reality, and its true beyond even tech. I have a few friends with MBA's (accountants / finance) and they say similar things about their jobs too, switching every few years to get better compensation and once their growth starts to plateau they just rinse and repeat.

Assuming the giant incentive you refer to is job security, constant purposeful refactors, I don't know if this theory plays out in real life. There are a lot of reasons that software tends to be brittle and short-lived, but I feel pretty confident in saying that none of the teams I've worked with have purposefully engaged in planned obsolescence.

Isn’t this like saying that doctors have incentives to encourage people to get sick? What am I missing?

Which is a true statement.

There are many ongoing treatments in the medical industry, and dare I say it, active suppression of permanent cures.

There are also massive side effects to many of the medical industries treatments. Ie medicine 1 alleviates condition 1, while causing condition 2 in the future. Basically making their own business at the cost of human misery.

There's massive cognitive dissonance in this situation, and most doctors never think about it that way. But people whose lives have been reduced to ongoing suffering through the system certainly have. It's not a cynical take even, it's a realistic take without the rose coloured glasses.

Note this is not saying there aren't benefits or useful features to medical industry treatments. Just that there are also anti-features, and the market incentives have created the situation we have, instead of much better and humane treatments which would be possible without the financial incentives of the medical industry.

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