Sabre and ATC core code are 50+ years old. Lockheed bought a particular unix source license 15 years ago for ATC sytems because the vendor would no longer support it.

Everyone who wrote it is retired or dead.

The vast majority of software is more like hipster react web dev garbage than serious engineering.

It's good to stay away from this sort of dismissive language. I'm a so-called "serious engineer" that's spent most of their career working on compilers and embedded OSes, designed and implemented a production JIT compilers, and a wide array of other stuff some people might characterize as deep magic.

There is significant complexity and depth to front end tooling these days, and I consider my colleagues working in that space to be as talented and experienced as anyone else.

The issues in the frontend space seem to me to arise as an artifact of the fact that the work they produce is far more visible and directly evaluateable by non-technical people. The demands they have placed on them to deliver features quickly is far higher. They're far closer to the user-experience side of the product than most backend devs. And they have to deal with a tools ecosystem that evolves and changes far faster than others.

Trying to describe that complex issue in terms of stratification of developers into "serious engineers" and "not serious ones" does a disservice to the underlying problem, and doesn't help address it.

Most of the complexity in front end development is self-inflicted, and the result of amateurish pseudo-engineering. It isn’t dismissive; it’s accurate. Sometimes things just aren’t very good or have poor quality. That’s a separate issue from how smart people working on the issue may be.

I would have to emphatically disagree. The application architecture of the contemporary web - a distributed system which involves smearing application state and logic by transporting code and data dynamically as needed from one location to another - has only existed for at most 15 years (since the advent of "fast javascript" with V8 and the growth of the set of APIs that enable rich network interaction, which we can summarize crudely as "web 2.0" or "AJAX" or what have you).

The flux and frenzy in the space is much more a sympton of the novel nature of the application architecture, the size and speed of growth of industry around it, and the rate of experimentation with frameworks and tools to quickly build extensive applications within it. Those are not self-inflicted, but circumstantial.

> That’s a separate issue from how smart people working on the issue may be.

I took particular issue with the original commenter dismissing an entire class of developers on the basis of what tools they worked with. I found it to be an example of gatekeeping that unfortunately is far too common in the industry.

I was the original commenter; stand by the comments. It's not gatekeeping. I don't think any particular area or specialty/focus of software development is better, requires more intelligence or anything like that. It was an observation of the state of affairs, not a commentary on worthiness.

The vast majority of software doesn't need serious engineering either. If Google breaks that isn't a big deal, even though almost everyone in the world will be annoyed.

Which systems do not need serious engineering? How much money or damage is "no big deal"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/search/results?form_type=Basic&res...

Data breaches don't kill people in general. Medical devices can.

Your point is well taken, even though things are not as bad they are still bad.

How much non-aviation software is built to similar quality standards?