People are very capable of good design but are not given time to do good design. Temporary band-aids become permanent fixtures and eventually the company is drowning in tech debt. It is a tale as old as time.
I still think you could have multiple levels of skill across design and code implementation though
Our profession doesn’t really know what it is, and that makes us easily manipulated.
Most professionals have to wrestle with time constraints. Push hard enough and at some point the carpenter/doctor/civil engineer/whatever firmly says “no”.
What’s the difference in software that unbounded tech debt is permissible?
Clients regularly tell carpenters to “just do X” against the professional’s better judgement. The carpenter isn’t going to call the collapsing Jerry rigged staircase tech debt, instead they tell the client “no, I won’t do it”.
Our profession generally lacks sufficient apprenticeship. We could learn a thing or two from student doctors doing their rounds.
> Our profession generally lacks sufficient apprenticeship. We could learn a thing or two from student doctors doing their rounds.
I'm not sure how apprenticeship would solve this problem in software. To me, the difference seems to be that unlike carpenters, most people in software don't work on a contract basis for specific clients, but as an employee of a specific company. We don't have the authority to just refuse to do what we're told, and even in fairly good workplaces where you can voice technical disagreement without fear of repercussions, at the end of the day you'll often get overruled and have to go along with what you're told.
So they're only good in theory given infinite time, but not in the real world where someone's waiting to be able to use what they're working on?
When did people learn good design?