I agree that something is out of whack. In-house plane-jane CRUD development used to be pretty simple and quick in the 90's. One could focus on the domain analysis side instead of micromanage tech. The IDE products had glitches, but got better every release, including deployment. The Web bleeped it all to heck and back, and nobody seems interested in promoting the standards to fix it. We toss in JavaScript gizmos to attempt to improve the UI to desktop standards, but these gizmos are clunky and browser-version-sensitive. Maybe the desktop era tools were artistically ugly, but much easier to develop and maintain. PHB's seem more swayed by UI eye-candy than practicality. It's great job security, but hugely wasteful. Our industry needs some deep soul-searching.
I think this is what pisses me off the most. The frontend is a complete clusterfuck, but the serverside is almost as bad. Everything is just half-assed and you end up spending most of your time fighting the tech. The worst thing is people who have drunk the Kool-Aid and just stare you, uncomprehending, when you complain that lunatics are running the asylum and the only way to win is to not play. Or at best agree but have ended up silently accepting the situation as a coping mechanism of some sort, like people in abusive relationships. "It's not that bad, there are good moments too, and besides, I'd have nowhere to go anyway."
I think I'm done with the tech industry. 98% of the sort of programming people actually pay you for is about as pleasant as a root canal. I'm currently on a sick leave and seriously entertaining the idea of changing careers to something entirely different. Like gardening.
> I think I'm done with the tech industry. 98% of the sort of programming people actually pay you for is about as pleasant as a root canal. I'm currently on a sick leave and seriously entertaining the idea of changing careers to something entirely different. Like gardening.
More than a decade of professional software development later, I'm having very similar thoughts.
I now spend 1/4 of my work week fighting dependency hell (after just about each addition of a new package by any other developer on the project), another 1/4 figuring out how the "latest and greatest" tool of the week is best used to do something that would normally take me 5 minutes to do custom (god forbid, not the C-word!), and the remaining half is spent maybe doing actual work. So incredibly frustrating that I've just about had it.
I've grown to loathe and hate that which I used to adore.
