The humankind must re-think its approach to software development now before it is too late

The quality of software is degrading every day as millions more inept pretend-developers are flooding the IT job market. Attracted by higher salaries and better working conditions than other industries, they forget the most important thing: responsibility for the impact they can make on the job.

Recently I and my just as senior co-worker have been told by our manager that "we test too much". He meant that it takes us longer to go to production than for a novice developer fresh from school in the next cubicle. We exchanged meaningful glances and shrugged: we cannot help it. It is ingrained in us to take responsibility for the results of our work, which entails a lot of testing. The young fellow just codes and releases. Those pesky bugs can be figured out later. And they come in swarms.

Linux never enjoyed mass adoption, but today there is a mass exodus from Linux as repo maintainers happily gulp pre-alpha quality code into production repos. "Unchecked, unchalleged" (c) JRRT these new developers carnage over their dwindling user base: write, release if compiles, enhance their resume, get a job and move on. Who cares that their new code is buggy? Linux rules and that trumps all.

We have been screaming about Gnome 3 fiasco, systemd back-dooring, memory management nightmares, polkitd hijacking CPUs and numerous other issues, but no one is interested in hearing that. Instead it is develop first, never ask questions mode of operation.

Linux memory over-allocation under IO pressure has been a catastrophe since v.2 kernels. We are now on v.5 and it has been at least 15 years. No one bothered to focus on finding a solution and it has been swept under the rug by everyone from Torvalds and Kox to the last monkey-developer at RedHat.

But these unscrupulous developers do not stop at the open-source projects - they spread and crawl into companies who write real-world software: banking, insurance, traffic control, healthcare, manufacturing, power generation - you name it - bringing along their open-source habits of not giving a fuck about quality. We now live in a world, which increasingly depends on decreasingly reliable software.

Many of those open-source developers have been hired by Microsoft, especially under their present thug-leader (or leader-thug) and this immediately manifested itself in the diminishing quality of the OSs: fabulous XP, mediocre 7, cuckoo 8, and, finally, the demented, horrendous 10.

At the same time high-quality OSs have all but kicked the bucket: QNX and OS/2 are history, Solaris turned into a sad caricature on itself, AIX is used by those two companies, can't remember their names. Only iSeries still stands proud among the cesspool of computer filth.

When this pus-filled boil finally burst, you better be prepared! I am. I have stashed copies of old OSs, compilers, and hardware to run them. Good luck to us all!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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