2024 Stack Overflow Survey Results
No surprise there. What are we even doing? I haven’t written something important at work since the beginning of my career. It is/was a learning experience for sure - I’m not dumber for it, but nothing I wrote had to be written. The world could’ve done without any product I helped develop.
GNU Guix seems quite important to me.
A part of it is horrible practices and a work culture which incentivizes them.
Who can be happy when the code doesn’t work half the time, deployments are manual and happen after work hours, and devs are forced to be “on-call”?
Introduce Test-Driven Development, Domain-Driven Design, Continuous Deployment with Feature Flags, Mutation Testing and actual agile practices (as described in the Agile Manifesto, not the pathetic attempt to rebrand waterfall we have in most companies) to the project and see how happiness rises, along with the project’s reliability and maintainability.
Oh, and throw in a 4 day work week, because no one can be mentally productive for that long.
IMO the biggest problem in the industry is that most developers have never seen a project actually following best practices and middle management is invested in making sure it never happens.
Out of interest, do you think that this would be a natural occurrence in the industry if a company were to say “right, no more managers, you self-manage and build this ting, and if it doesn’t work we go bust”, would software engineers look to build the best possible thing to their knowledge?
It’s something I occasionally think about, because various companies like Valve and Fog Creek a decade or so ago did try similar stuff - and they had some great success with some absolute duds.
It would probably start to look a lot like Lisp programming, as in how Crash Bandicoot was made.
