> often love to condescendingly assert that users are just not reading the docs, or are not smart enough to understand the software.
The older I get, the more annoying I find this habit in the SWE community. It's not even a well earned condescension. Software is often horrible! Physical hardware products are not put out into the world with the kind of defects that software so regularly is.
We get away with it because we say we can patch it later, though often all we do is move defects around.
It's amazing picking up pre-internet connected era electronics from 30/40/50 years ago and they just.. work.
Meanwhile software decays at a faster and faster rate each year. I am coming around to the idea of keeping air gapped old-OS machines around just to maintain pieces of software that otherwise auto-update themselves into oblivion.
The older I get, the more annoying I find this habit in the SWE community. It's not even a well earned condescension. Software is often horrible! Physical hardware products are not put out into the world with the kind of defects that software so regularly is.
We get away with it because we say we can patch it later, though often all we do is move defects around.
It's amazing picking up pre-internet connected era electronics from 30/40/50 years ago and they just.. work.
Meanwhile software decays at a faster and faster rate each year. I am coming around to the idea of keeping air gapped old-OS machines around just to maintain pieces of software that otherwise auto-update themselves into oblivion.