[poikroequ]

The bigger problem I've seen is high turnover rates in the industry. The people who built and know the system leave. There wasn't a sufficient window for KT (knowledge transfer), so you're left with a bunch of new devs who only have a surface level understanding of the code and architecture. Productivity drops severely because every new feature requires several hours of reading code / reverse engineering. Then these new features often break other things because the devs don't know the intricacies of the system, so many more hours are spent fixing the bugs.

[whaleofatw2022]

I see a related issue, but Moreno with contractors.

Companies outsourcing new dev to random houses and expecting the in house people to fix bugs when they weren't even on the pull requests half the time.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I agree. The distressingly short tenure of staff, these days, causes many problems.

The solution is not so easy. There's a real reason that people have so little loyalty to employers.

I feel that the first move needs to be made by employers. They need to give people a reason to stay (and it is not always money, but that is a big motivator).

When they do that, some employees will take advantage of their employers, and that needs to be factored in, at the beginning. None of this "Lazy Bob is the reason I'm screwing you all." stuff. I believe that collective punishment is a war crime, but we do it all the time, in business. We need to come up with smart, adaptable, heuristic policies that work for all employees; not simplistic "One size fits all" HR policies that make lawyers happy.

And employers need to stop deliberately screwing their employees. Eventually, things will settle out, where that's rewarded, but it might take a long time to get there.

But that's just a dream. I am under no illusion that it will actually happen. Instead, we can look forward to decades of Jurassic-scale disasters, and after-the-fact hand-wringing.

[from-nibly]

See also programming as theory building.