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.That's not my experience.My experience is that software bloat comes from people who think they know what they're doing, but actually don't.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.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.