Software as a profession sucks, a rant.

[Mark Woodward]

A rant from a 25 year veteran of the software/high tech industry

I am 46 years old and getting sick of the industry.  In case anyone 
hasn't noticed, we've gone from white collar to blue collar in just over 
a decade and a half. In the 80s and early 90s there was creativity and 
growth. These days the only ones making money are the stock holders and 
the MBAs that outsource the work.

I'm making effectively less today than I was 10 years ago. The work has 
gone from technically challenging to challenging just to keep focused. 
The atmosphere has gone from casual "our deadline is x/y/z lets get it 
done" to "what are you working on right now?" with no understanding of 
the engineering process. The management, perhaps because of the trendy 
popularization of technology making it seem easy, which is, of course a 
lie, thinks that architecture is also simple and that seemingly simple 
ideas are simple to implement fast, efficiently, and quickly.

I understand the environment is competitive, ask anyone who's been in 
the business, it has always been this way. It has always been full of 
impossible deadlines and fierce competition. Debugging software on-route 
to the trade show or customer is old hat.

Maybe you can argue that there is nothing really new to do in software, 
but I can think of a few big projects, how about you? The industry has 
gotten "smaller." It doesn't think big any more. It doesn't think about 
"creating" something new and being sustainable. Startups think about 
quickly riding some wave of popularity and hoping to get some funding 
and then bought out by someone bigger. Its depressing. Existing 
companies only want to milk the cash cow until it dies. If you can't 
predict short term profitability you can't start something new.

Sure, I've heard the argument, "the industry is maturing and tighter 
management means less risk." Well, that isn't true either, the same 
percentage of software companies fail as they always have. I guess 
lesser dreams just lose less when they fail.

As for the risk, we see how that's playing out. We are losing good 
paying and creative jobs to overseas contractors, and those contractors 
with actual experience and skills provided by jobs we sent them, are now 
competing directly with us. It is a race to the bottom where the country 
with the lowest standard of living wins. Who's risk is that?

Am I ranting nonsense?
What does BLU think?