How Software Gets Bloated: From Telephony to Bitcoin
> software bloat almost always comes from smart, often the smartest, devs who are technically the most competent.<p>That's not my experience.<p>My experience is that software bloat comes from people who <i>think</i> they know what they're doing, but actually don't.<p>Competent programmers tend to be much more cynical about their own ability to write good code.  They've been burned too many times by bad code, including their own.<p>The cases discussed here are not about competence or brains.  They're about upgrading systems, which maintaining compatibility with existing systems.  That is very, very, hard for anyone to do.