IMO I think that’s more a reflection of business decisions rather than innate programmer skill.
Programmers used to do that because they had to do that, so the businesses valued it. Now they don’t have to do that, so businesses don’t allow them room to develop those skills.
I think that rate that people actually developed unnecessary skills outside of work likely remains the same, just the skills that people desire are different to the ones from back then.
That’s a valid point, the dev cycle is compressed now and customer expectations are low.
So instead of putting in the long term effort to deliver and support a quality product, something that should have been considered a beta is just shipped and called “good enough”.
A good example I guess would be a long term embedded OSS project like Tasmota, compared to the barely functional firmware that comes stock on the devices that people buy to reflash to Tasmota.
Still there are few things that frustrate me like some Bluetooth device that really shouldn’t have been a Bluetooth device, and has non-deterministic behaviour due to lack of initialization or some other trivial fault. Why did the tractor work lights turn on as purple today? Nobody knows!
IMO I think that’s more a reflection of business decisions rather than innate programmer skill.
Programmers used to do that because they had to do that, so the businesses valued it. Now they don’t have to do that, so businesses don’t allow them room to develop those skills.
I think that rate that people actually developed unnecessary skills outside of work likely remains the same, just the skills that people desire are different to the ones from back then.
That’s a valid point, the dev cycle is compressed now and customer expectations are low.
So instead of putting in the long term effort to deliver and support a quality product, something that should have been considered a beta is just shipped and called “good enough”.
A good example I guess would be a long term embedded OSS project like Tasmota, compared to the barely functional firmware that comes stock on the devices that people buy to reflash to Tasmota.
Still there are few things that frustrate me like some Bluetooth device that really shouldn’t have been a Bluetooth device, and has non-deterministic behaviour due to lack of initialization or some other trivial fault. Why did the tractor work lights turn on as purple today? Nobody knows!