Software Disenchantment (2018)
I agree it&#x27;s all slower and sucks. But I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s solely a technical problem.<p>1&#x2F; What didn&#x27;t seem to get mentioned was the speed to market. It&#x27;s far worse to build the right thing no one wants, than to build the crappy thing that some people want a lot. As a result, it makes sense for people to leverage electron--but it has consequences for users down the line.<p>2&#x2F; Because we deal with orders of magnitude with software, it&#x27;s not actually a good ROI to deal with things that are under 1x improvement on a human scale. So what made sense to optimize when computers were 300MHz doesn&#x27;t make sense at all when computers are 1GHz, given a limited time and budget.<p>3&#x2F; Anecdotally (and others can nix or verify), what I hear from ex-Googlers is that no one gets credit for maintaining the existing software or trying to make it faster. The only way you get promoted is if you created a new project. So that&#x27;s what people end up doing, and you get 4 or 5 versions of the same project that do the same thing, all not very well.<p>I agree that the suckage is a problem. But I think it&#x27;s the structure of incentives in the environment that software is written that also needs to be addressed, not just the technical deficiencies of how we practice writing software, like how to maintain state.<p>It&#x27;s interesting Chris Granger submitted this. I can see that the gears have been turning for him on this topic again.