It doesn't matter to me who turned the wrench, but in my career I've encountered these types where it's only good enough if it's theirs. And IMHO their output is generally quite atrocious. Root cause: Psychological issues.
What’s missing a lot is empathy, and that takes slowing down and observing.
Just to share the terminology, under underlying stuff I mean the linux kernel, the JVM, etc, while higher level stuff could be certain build tools (khm, looking at you npm), and of course end user tools that are unfortunately way too buggy. Like I have a hard time listing end user applications where I didn’t notice a bug yet.
Give me a tight, highly coherent API, with a culture of avoiding feature factory work. At least get "Make it work, make it right, make it fast" to not skip "make it right" anymore. That's sort of the core illness in software today.
Open source doesn't have to be pushed by business concerns. There's a degree of regulatory capture, but the biggest problem is that we just don't know any better. We repeat what we see, and make sure our own pain points are handled. I've seen this play out in API design where an awful API is introduced, and each person who fixes it only fixes 20% of the pain, and so it's 10 years before we get from a mediocre library to one you could actually call 'good', because nobody made 'good', they made better than better than better than ridiculous.
In my past at $medalyaorwherever it was a fucking nightmare everyday, the Architect wouldn't let the PR close.
I tell my boss you want 2-3 people like me on the project. If everyone was like me we'd make each other miserable. I have worked on trying to frame these things in a positive manner. Unfortunately the guy who would have been the best mentor in that regard went into semi-retirement.
I don't know about OP, but I personally feel like software like GCC/clang/MSVC and Debian/Ubuntu and Docker and SSH and Git are pretty great, and were never better.
Heck, the whole dotnet ecosystem is turning some significant problems in developer experience into at most minor nuisances.
Even Firefox+Chrome are stellar, and extremely solid as-is.
Where exactly is this bad software OP is talking about?
If you are using one of the major cloud providers and instead of just using a native IaC scripts, you have decided that it would be better if the developers only had access to your custom kubernetes operators to manage their infrastructure then you are the problem.
If you are using a deployment pipeline that developers have zero involvement in, and they just "import your Jenkins scripts" then you are the problem.
If you are using major cloud provider and rather than just using their managed kubernetes, you have decided to deploy your own, then the chances are that you are the problem.
Rarely have these approaches ever been stable, in my 20+ year experience they have never been stable. And they are the reason that "real DevOps" came along because developers could do a better job with less downtime if people actually engaged them.
Really not sure what you're commenting about here