> Is there any special reason to believe that closed source is any better?

As many (most?) of us on HN are in some sense or another professional programmers I would think that would be an easy question to answer.

In my opinion the vast bulk of closed source code suffers from exactly the same constraints.

And most definitely there are vast quantities of quite execrable code in closed source programs. I've seen plenty and written some.

Closed-source crap is better because it's not available to the world, so millions of developers don't waste time exploring it and finding out that it's unusable.

Generally, a business pays developers to write software that it expects to be put to immediate use, which means that most of the time it functions, at least minimally. I'm sure exceptions exist, of course.

FLOSS abandonware has no such constraint.

Generally, expectations do not define reality.

I'm not just being contrary, I've worked on a project for a year or two that got scrapped, and I think it happens a lot.

Another way to look at it, is that if you have programmers that are regular employees and not temps or something, you might as well have them work on something that's not very important, or that's risky, when you don't have something better for them to do, because you're paying them anyway.

I’m convinced if they stopped paying us all to rewrite things that work the market would fall out from under us.

Every job I’ve ever been involved with has always had some code base that was in framework X and now needs to be in framework Y, or on in house hardware and needs to move to the cloud, etc etc.

And having just interviewed every place has a project like that. “We were using PHP for the mvp but are moving to RoR”, “We were using class based react but now we’re using hooks”, etc etc.

I feel half of it is valuable migrations and half of it is to always have something on our plates.

And it always has to get done yesterday. What a world.

Most software engineers I know love to build software for the sake of itself. They are not all that interested in the business. Most businesses for which software is being produced is not personally relatable or interesting to most software engineers.

To keep engineers motivated, the work has to have sufficient amount technical accomplishments and not just churning out business features.

Luckily, due to continuous growth in market and scale of users, and improvements in hardware, there is opportunity for serious amount of technical work in any project.

Also, faster time to market is of real business value. Compromises are done in ideal perfect designs to meet timelines (or resource constraints) – hence, tech debt occurs and it is real and just as useful as financial debt to help scale a business in a competing marketplace.

And speculative/iterative market feedback based development is also real. All these things add up to one thing – things that were right for yesterday isn't right for tomorrow.

So we have to rewrite or refactor software continuously. And that's perfectly normal. It is actually one of the biggest strengths of software based solutions – that we can change things live - while it is already in use - change the engines of the rocket while it is flying - so to speak. We have to embrace this and leverage it disruptively.

Those who pine for perfect software are denying realities of the larger real-world.

My first six months of employment at my current job consisted of going from one project to another that the C-levels listed as "a top priority for the company"--like, called all-hands meetings and told everyone about this great thing and how important the people working on it were--and then decided to cancel.

Two years later, that still happens from time to time.

So, from my point of view, it looks much more like businesses pay developers to write software to be thrown away. Which I guess is fine with me, as long as my paycheck keeps coming....

Honestly, isn't it bothering you that they are wasting your time ?

Yes. But they give me a regular paycheck and extremely generous vacation and sick days, and nobody else I've interviewed with or been contacted by recruiters for can match those benefits... so I stay. At least until my RSUs vest.

Sounds like you work at a startup that was very young when you first joined.

If this is the case, did any of those projects contribute to you guys still being around now, two years later?

Nope. I work for a major corporation that owns its own entire office building for headquarters and operates in over 30 states.

None of those projects contributed to still being around 2 years later, but one of them (if simulations based on prior years' data are assumed to be reasonably accurate) would've improved revenue on one of our sales channels by approximately 30% if it had actually been put into production....