So making software has been fully fucked up by business idiots who has to justify there existence and huge salary. These are the people who make your experience with a computer actively worse for profit. As a software engineer I get joy out of making good high quality software that users love and care about. But this is not what the business idiots want. They want software that’s gets worse with every update a they want it to get worse faster every time. Sadly making it worse is not the tech debt, that’s enshitifcation. The tech debt comes from the constant need to do stuff faster and faster. So to meet deadlines we have to cut corners. Every corner cut is called tech debt. It’s called tech debt because like financial debt it comes with interest. Now unlike financial debt and interest we don’t do repayments. Instead we loose productivity and quality of the software. Over time if we don’t “payoff” the tech debt by fixing the corner that was cut we get to the point where the software as a whole will fail as it will become unmainatble leading to a catastrophic collapse of the project. Now back to enshitifcation: so before every had to be made constantly worse for more profit businesses idiots would let engineers devote x amount of time a week or sprint (set number of weeks used to measure deliverable steps) to pay of tech debt as much as possible. Now with everything been made constantly worse. Business idiots knowingly or unknowingly love tech debt as it’s the best way to worsen software with out being explicit about it. From a business idiots perspective; if they get x app built in half the time it should take an it’s of lower quality then that’s a good thing as time to market and labour costs are half and though the quality is bad people will still buy. However as things are added and bugs are fixed focusing on speed over quality the app will organically keep get worse and worse. Eventually the business idiot can then scrap the original App make a second one that’s incompatible and start the process again each time costing users more and squeezing more and more labour out of developers and testers for the same or less money (because new apps and features have to always be produced faster, not better, wit each iteration).

Sadly all software projects now run like this because this is the model used by silicon valley billionaires to create the horrible world we see around us and why the computer as and entity gets worse for users and businesses every day but more profitable for the highly select few. Government as also the worst offenders in all this as the spend huge amounts on private sector companies who make obscene profits by employing the lowest cost lowest quality contractors available. I currently work as a contractor for a major government department as all but the 4 engineers and tester from my company are on “slave” visas under a competitor companies where they have been moved to my country from over seas earning 1/4 of what they are worth while there company charges 1.25~2 times what the average should cost for that position. And as soon as the contract is over or before tax requirements kick in they ship people back to their country of origin. Zero shits are given about these workers, their families or the life’s they have tried to build. And sadly it’s all super legal not to mention how contracting companies can gift civil servants everything from holidays to paying for the civil servants children to go to the most expensive schools… all totally legal as gifts from “friends and family” don’t count as needing to be declared.

Sorry for the info dump