[somenameforme]

The article doesn't mention the most basic cause and issue: motivations. One guy writes absurdly bloated and bug prone code, but creates workable components/products/whatever in a month. Another guy writes tight, elegant, and rock solid code for the same thing in 6 months. The first guy's getting promoted and the second guy's going to end up having to explain his 'lack of productivity.'

It creates a motivation system of to get something working, or even more cynically to just get something that looks like its working. The half dozen intermittently en vogue development acronyms also further this mindset. I don't see how to overcome this issue, because it's something like a tragedy of the commons. Nobody (at the top) wants to reduce bloat because it would likely reduce rather than increase profit on short time frames. Yet, at scale, it's leading to a complete enshittification of all software.

[bee_rider]

Why do we have all these layers of middle management, if not to promote the first guy up into them and hopefully out of the way?

[palata]

> Nobody (at the top) wants to reduce bloat because it would likely reduce rather than increase profit on short time frames.

And also because they were probably "the first guy", chances are that they don't even know about bloat at all.