[mlom]

the entire point of large scale technological literacy is to replace the tech sector. no web app you write is going to be more useful to an organization than an administrative staff that just knows SQL and can use it on the fly for queries, reports, and analysis. software developers are working against the tide: think about how much simpler dev tools are than user tools. as users become more sophisticated then you expect them to need simpler rather than more complex tools.

[zeruch]

"as users become more sophisticated then you expect them to need simpler rather than more complex tools."

That sentence seems inherently contradictory.

...and yet all the stuff being built by and large makes users less sophisticated as consumers and their 'technological literacy' questionable. At no point in the last 3 decades, and no one moving forward currently, has shown any interest in making the masses use SQL for anything at an administrative level, and users have shown ever less interest in how any of the tech works, or what it can do, as long as it fulfills whatever prima facie use case they care about.

[mlom]

enterprise software isn't built for users, it's built for the upper level administrators who contract the software, and for the amusement and profit of the engineers who are paid a large multiple of the salaries of any of the people who will be forced to use their systems and consume their ads at work. the result is developers getting paid a lot, not improving anyone's life, and then spending their earnings on our labor time, when we become available as food service workers, sex workers, and so on. the categories of technical competence and social awareness are not supposed to intersect.

as a developer you know perfectly well that as you become more sophisticated you can do much more using much simpler tools.

i don't think you people have any idea of the kind of environment into which your software is deployed. you're mostly happy to ship any crap that will superficially justify the infinite expansion of bloatware that you get paid to produce.

[zeruch]

"enterprise software isn't built for users, it's built for the upper level administrators who contract the software, and for the amusement and profit of the engineers who are paid a large multiple of the salaries of any of the people who will be forced to use their systems and consume their ads at work."

That might be generally the case (and certainly historically true) but that has been changing for the last decade (disclosure, I worked in CRM for a decade and that was very much position taken internally, "focus on actual users at least as much as any upstream stakeholder" especially as mobile started to really take off).

"the categories of technical competence and social awareness are not supposed to intersect."

Not supposed to, or avoided by certain folks in order to expand a customer base to the biggest L in the LCD acronym possible?

[mlom]

no, it's not changing, i'm sorry to say, and thank you for your disclosure, but i'm afraid you are not in a position to see the problem clearly.

not supposed to, as in, a majority of industry stakeholders have (apparently, based on their behavior) strong motivations to mystify technology to themselves and others, to represent maintenance as innovation, and so on, because disruption and innovation are the standards we've set for ourselves.

in the meantime, we have such disasters happening as js-dependent archive.org. how can this be tolerated?

i certainly believe that your company's internal position was to "focus on users" but the truth is that managing the flaws of overengineered systems in practice takes up a huge amount of administrators' time, and they develop no competencies as a result, so it is pure wasted time. most of them have no idea that there exists a relatively simple language for looking up student data. no one has ever told them "there exists a simple way of saying 'give me a list of all the students who failed calculus last year'" or whatever. lots of them still have to navigate ancient terminal applications, and all the people who could theoretically be helping these organizations reorganize themselves and use technology better are making very big salaries just selling them overengineered software instead.

since the software is bloated and breaking the web, the organization also ends up upgrading its hardware frequently, so all the ancient contracts with dell and cisco and whatever keep grinding, and as a result video games look prettier and the military has more targeting computers and surveillance devices, and the developer class gets paid to… what? invest in real estate, vr equipment, and an illusion of progress?

[zeruch]

"i'm afraid you are not in a position to see the problem clearly."

Actually I am. I've worked both sides of the problem (and in that regard I agree its a problem), and see deficits on both, hence a different opinion, but thanks for the condescension and presumptive dismissal, as I now know about what further effort to devote to this conversation, which ends at the following period.

[mlom]

convenient, enjoy your "both sides". truly, you can have it all.