[j_m_b]

Software has gotten so bad over the past couple of decades. It's not as responsive as it was even in the 80-90s, yet we have orders of magnitude more powerful machines. Even simple website forms are often broken, due to everything from poor implementations to bit rot. It's perhaps just a coincidence that this time period has also been the rise of agile.

[IshKebab]

Nah you're misremembering. I'd say it's stayed about the same. I think it took a step improvement when SSDs became available so maybe it's slightly better than it used to be.

Do you not remember when it used to take minutes to boot your PC? Starting MS Word could easily take 30s. Unless your computer is broken it takes nowhere near that long now.

[antisthenes]

> Do you not remember when it used to take minutes to boot your PC? Starting MS Word could easily take 30s. Unless your computer is broken it takes nowhere near that long now.

No, it never took that long if you took care of your PC, e.g. not have 50 things in your startup programs or a 99% full undefragged hard drive.

But yes, SSDs improved startup times massively, and were responsible for masking how bad software has gotten in the last 10 years.

[belter]

I can tell you for a fact that there was a period of 2 to 5 years in many parts of Europe—ranging from the Netherlands to Luxembourg, Belgium, Austria, France, and beyond—where you would not be hired as a contractor or consultant if you even dared to question some of the core tenets of Agile.

[skydhash]

There are good software, but you have to look at the indy side or the FOSS side. It’s like how big companies conduct projects is not how it should be done.

[dmvdoug]

Make software warrantable. If you sell software that purports to do X, you are at least implicitly warranting it is fit for purpose, etc. Allowing companies to disclaim all warranties means they have no incentive to make sure their software actually works well, because if it doesn’t, there ain’t shit a customer can do aside from spin the wheel and try the next one.

You know, our torts and contracts common law is a powerful mechanism, but there’s always movement to limit people’s ability to make use of it (ranging from tort reform to various doctrines on warranties and so on).