Re:Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to sof...
by jrochkind1 on Friday June 16, 2023 @09:28AM
(#36356248)
That's fair, and a good observation.
I'm not sure what to make of it as far as general narrative.
If people are creating stuff they don't really care about, of course it won't be very good? And there's a lot of money spent paying people to build things that honestly nobody would reasonably care much about?
One way or another, the pining for a software engineering world where we all collaborate on creating things that are maintainable products with high-quality user-facing experiences, and have the time to do that... well, that's not the one we've got.
That said, I've been at places where management did a pretty good job of making sure that there was enough time to do this kind of work with middling results. People have to enjoy the work or feel invested in a way that makes them care about "3 years from now", and sadly in a lot of places there's a lot of "whatever, it'll be fine for as long as I work here."
It seemed to me that in let's say 50% of cases, having the extra time didn't really matter. Assumptions about what was being built were proven incorrect not long after a design was laid down and work had begun, or particular engineering types would create increasingly complicated designs with their time rather than doing the hard work of distilling the problem, sometimes including $PET_TECHNOLOGY as part of their solution.
The "let's design something truly great" really has to be in a team's DNA in my experience or you wind up with a good design that isn't followed, one person who does all the work, a gold plated design, etc.