I think we have some soul searching as an industry. I don't think anyone is blameless. It's easy to say that software development at large, on average, quality has gone down. Or the average employee is less effective. It's easy to blame employees, or remote work, or somesuch but I think its deeper than that.
I think a lot of engineering culture is rotten. Companies themselves have low expectations on quality and delivery. Management layers have gotten thick and calcified. Engineers are resigned to low expectations while also churning out results for this quarter, rather than longer-term objectives and growth.
A lot of executives are disconnected from their employees. They want RTO, etc. But they have no empathy for how disruptive this is. They themselves have resigned to just being "yet another company" with nothing special other than the next quarter, the next quarter, the next quarter. And employees see this and decide to just punch a clock and not get too invested.
We / these companies used to dream big and deliver bigger. Now its something of a cultural race to the bottom, and we all share some blame here.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 14.2 ms ] threadI know this is a tired trope, but when you do look at revenue per employee, headcount grows, but the return on revenue does not.
https://fourweekmba.com/zoom-revenue-per-employee/
I think we have some soul searching as an industry. I don't think anyone is blameless. It's easy to say that software development at large, on average, quality has gone down. Or the average employee is less effective. It's easy to blame employees, or remote work, or somesuch but I think its deeper than that.
I think a lot of engineering culture is rotten. Companies themselves have low expectations on quality and delivery. Management layers have gotten thick and calcified. Engineers are resigned to low expectations while also churning out results for this quarter, rather than longer-term objectives and growth.
A lot of executives are disconnected from their employees. They want RTO, etc. But they have no empathy for how disruptive this is. They themselves have resigned to just being "yet another company" with nothing special other than the next quarter, the next quarter, the next quarter. And employees see this and decide to just punch a clock and not get too invested.
We / these companies used to dream big and deliver bigger. Now its something of a cultural race to the bottom, and we all share some blame here.