[xyst]

good design and implementation requires skilled people. you don't get either with bottom of the barrel pay grades.

something I have noticed in this industry is that big companies think they can outsource their staffing issues and "save on labor". But in the end they pay more in management of outsourced assets, inevitable maintenance of poorly designed and implemented software, delays in delivery, and of course the churn and burn of hiring/firing contractors. Then they end up redoing everything with local talent with 1/8th the team in half the time.

It only took 3-4 years to realize this but this is what the "trough of despair" really looks like.

[mattgreenrocks]

It's beautiful that this sort of expediency often comes back to bite decision makers. Unfortunately, the timescale in which it occurs makes it very possible to simply ignore the fact that they created the problem in the first place.

This also is why I do not believe LLMs pose as big a threat to software development as we're told. Maintenance will always require humans that can simultaneously comprehend the system as it is today and the system as it should be in the future.

[oopsallmagic]

You don't necessarily get them at high pay grades, either. I know people making fat salaries who truly can't manage to write anything decent, it's all a big JS monstrosity with 500 MB of broken dependencies and six build tools that all jump major versions every eight weeks.

Salary has long since been disconnected from skill, ever since cheap money flooded the industry, and easier abstractions made it seem like "everyone can code". Perhaps "fog a mirror" shouldn't be the only programmer criterion.