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> Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards.

Agree that is a factor, but a small one.

> It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart.

Respectfully disagree here. Systems have been complex for decades. Who knows when the last time was a single person understood everything about their computer (with respect to both hardware and software)

The problem is simpler imho. Really it's just a problem of perverse incentives.

1. Coding schools / bootcamps are incentivized to churn out people branded as "senior" when they have a mere 6 months of practice.

2. Managers are incentivized to churn out "features" and "changes", built on tenuous connections to some half-baked customer research.

3. Engineers are pressured to "move fast and break things" while simultaneously switching between teams/companies for easy promotion, before getting a chance to fix the things they broke.

The list goes on and on. Basically there's this massive house of cards where everyone is incentivizing each other to do shoddy work and not be thorough.

Systems have been complex for decades, but bad incentives are more recent?

> 1. Coding schools / bootcamps are incentivized to churn out people branded as "senior" when they have a mere 6 months of practice.

What boot camp is purporting to graduate "senior" developers after 6 months?

>> Respectfully disagree here. Systems have been complex for decades. Who knows when the last time was a single person understood everything about their computer (with respect to both hardware and software)

Apple II/IIe/IIc. Nibble Magazine published the complete disassembly of the firmware at the time -- which was kind of a big deal. Apple chose not to sue them for violating copyright (which they could have if they chose).

Here's the Apple IIc schematic:

https://archive.org/details/Schematic_Diagram_of_the_Apple_I...

The hardware wasn't super special either. It was a 6502 with 74x series logic gates. The hardest part would have been the floppy drive controller. But even that seems conquerable by today's standards.

It's worth while comparing this to the Commodore computers at the time which had special chips. The 64 had the sid chip. The Amiga 500 had even more special chips.

Further that was part of the Jobs/Wozniak philosophical discussion. Woz thought computers should be hackable. Jobs thought it should be a walled garden. In the end, Jobs won, but left me behind as a customer.

A part of me wishes the RiscV computers would catch on -- even if they are slower. It would then be much simpler to understand a computer.

Didn't Apple (and some other companies) also publish some form of schematics (and microcode listings?) for the Apple I and other roughly contemporary machines?

> The problem is simpler imho. Really it's just a problem of perverse incentives.

It's probably even simpler than that:

1. Once software stopped being distributed on discs, managers cut QA and pre-release bug-fixing, because they'll just "fix it later in a patch."

If course the patches often have problems too, which will be fixed in later patches with their own problems, ad nauseam.

It's a case where a legitimate technical advance ultimately lead to worse outcomes, because it disrupted certain social "checks and balances."

4. Some countries allow the misuse of "engineering" titles even when people lack the background for having them

Indeed. If one hasn't built and maintained siege works for at least two seasons, or one crusade, then one hasn't earned the title of engineer.

I think there's a much simpler/happier issue in play - MBAs. Games from big studios are increasingly being directed and driven by people who have zero interest in games and just view it as a means to revenue. So games are being rushed out the door prematurely in an unimaginably buggy state, development rushed such that repairing the mess created (after launch of course) is an endless series of half-working duct tape and shoe strings, designed to coerce endless DLC purchases, and more.

And this is happening at the same time that game development tools have become richer than ever, asset stores have enough assets to feel effectively infinite, you can self publish to a market of hundreds of millions, and even if you do need/want funding there are options: crowd funding, Epic Mega Grants, etc. So for a skilled developer it's never been easier (or a better time) to go independent.

This is driving an endless brain drain of bigger game companies making the problems even worse, while at the same time small companies are starting to produce some amazing games. To give a relevant example here, a couple of guys left Ubisoft. They formed Amplitude Studios, and they then created Endless Legend [1], which I would highly recommend as an alternative to Civilization.

But the story doesn't end there. Because Endless Legend / Amplitude were so successful, they were bought by Sega. And Sega knew exactly what could make their games even better. Oh yeah, MBAs baby! So now Amplitude has turned into just another "big" studio, and their latest product Humankind, ostensibly in the exact same vein as Endless Legend/Civilization, is a mess. Now we just need a couple of Amplitude employees to leave and form Next Good Game Company Studios. Ah, the cycle of life!

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/289130/ENDLESS_Legend/

I like Endless Legend but it has nowhere the depth of Civ games.

I do remember the past and dealing with driver issues, irq conflicts and broken implementations of opengl or directx that crashed my games all the time. The countless hours trying to get unreal to run in hardware mode without crashing. Hours trying to find the right combo of drivers and IRQs and even moving slots.

That's just games. I don't know how many papers I lost due crashes due to macs not having protected memory so one app could take out the whole system.

I remember playing WoW on my brand new Mac Pro (circa 2005) and a month later the GPU was burned out. Replaced the GPU under warranty, a month later it burned out again. Replaced it a third time (with a lot of side eye from the Genius Bar), and decided to stop playing WoW. Never had any more issues with the GPU.

Was it WoW's fault? I would think that a GPU would prevent any application from damaging it, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

/s The universe is telling you to stop playing video games while living in your parent's basement.

Seriously though thermal expansion can break copper traces and solder joints. There was a waft of people literally baking their gpu's in the oven to remelt the solder joints during that same decade.

I recall wrapping my red-ringed Xbox 360 in a towel to "solve" this exact issue!

Macs in that era were notorious for overheating under any real load.

I had a 2011 MacBook Pro for a while that I later found was keeping a constant 100c without even spinning the fan at 100%! After a while, its cd drive failed, and I learned how to install Linux from a partition made in OSX... Eventually the whole thing became a brick.

I also worked with an iMac that would get strange video errors and freeze until I found an app to turn up the fan. With a little bit of air flow, it would run just fine.

I guess Apple proved one thing: hopes and dreams are not enough to cool a Core 2 Duo.

Yeah, but the Mac Pro was designed around huge fans. I think there were two huge 120mm fans in the front blowing through it.

I still suspect that the fan curve written into OSX still prioritized silence/efficiency over cooling performance.

No amount of fans can overcome a setting that refuses to spin them up.

My guess is that the fan spin-up/speed was based on the CPU temperature or the case temp, not necessarily the GPU temp. The GPU had its own puny fan, but I don't know if GPU temp was even the core issue, though likely.

I believe it's mostly due to a global change at the lower levels. It seems similar to google never ending beta (every month basic apps change in layout, color, UX.. it's surprisingly exhausting, even when there's a good idea, which is rare, it's flooded by a bag of mistakes). The constant update model with broadband/fiber access means changing things cost zero, no cost => no pressure to provide something of high quality.

Then games have been rethought to be only online .. many games don't have local multiplayer modes now.. it's a cultural/economical shift.

> Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards

Crashes, connectivity issues, and desyncing are as old as PC computer gaming, and they were all much worse in the past.

To be honest though, the Civilization games in particular are badly implemented. I had no end of similar issues with Civ V and Beyond Earth (didn’t play the earlier ones). I do agree with the general sentiment, but I find Civilization to be a kind of worst case scenario.

Meh, old software was also shit. Fucking Windows was unstable for almost a decade, and that was just the base that you run the other things on. What you describe actually matches my old experience with games, things being borked all the time, clients not seeing each other, and so on. Modern games are often as simple and right clicking my friend in Steam Friends, choose Join game, and then it even starts up my game AND joins the friend. Of course, the experience varies per game. Overwatch is smooth usually, Rainbow Six Siege often behaves strangely. But there's nothing here about modernity at all. Games are like businesses, neither is perfect, all it needs to be is to be able to sell.

The people responsible for Civ 6 are advertising multiplayer online play in an effort to take your money, while investing the least amount of money to say they delivered the feature. They are just milking the Civ franchise for all they can.

Compare this to Amazon AWS, YouTube, the iPhone, Microsoft Excel. These products make a ton of money and the companies that own them invest heavily.

With the exception of AWS, do you believe that any of the examples you cited are not “just milking the franchise for all they can”?

When was the last time YouTube, the iPhone, or Microsoft Excel added a meaningful (i.e. users wanted it) feature?

AWS is the worst offender. They don’t allow you to set hard limits on billing, claiming that is for your own good, while the fact is they are putting all your data on hostage so they could force sell you things at ridiculously high traffic price at the next unexpected traffic surge. Traffic price into AWS is free but traffic out is extremely expensive, preventing you from getting data out of it.

Excel brings out new features all the time while keeping 100% backwards compatability. The difference in features between old and new versions is staggering. They knew parts of their usage would get replaced by other software if they don't innovate, and so they did.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan to use Excel for all the use cases it's being used for, but it's probably by far the most versatile software out there and powers more businesses than any other software.

EDIT: And if you need an example for a new feature that users wanted, I heard a lot of people being really happy about the introduction of XLOOKUP, introduced very recently.

It's probably not going to be a popular counterpoint, but for instance, Microsoft has used 365 subscription fees to accelerate the development of Office and in my estimation it is actually getting better over time.

I also wonder what "software engineers have lost their culture" is meant to be measured against. There was lots of just utter bullshit software 20 years ago too.

I am a big fan of Firaxis games, but they have been releasing buggy games for a long time, so nothing really new for them.

What we need is liability, and returns like in other goods.

If everyone behaved with software like when they are pissed off at shop owners for selling them faulty products, this would have been sorted out long time ago.

Honestly, I haven't seen anything like that level of issue recently and I strongly suspect the issue here is Civ Six itself.

The last multiplayer game I played was Halo infinite. It went great. Did exactly what it's supposed to.

ETA: I am on Windows... At a cursory glance it looks like changing the download region fixes an issue you encounter in MacOS after updating the operating system. Apple being an also-ran platform for desktop gaming is a long-standing issue completely independent of whether we're in the era of cloud and patching.

I’ve had a horrible experience with that game. From extremely poor performance on an expensive graphics card, to the game just refusing to start without crashing.

I play Halo Infinite and the game play is great. The game crashes on a daily basis though so I don't agree with "Did exactly what it's supposed to"