When I’m feeling the most cranky and pessimistic, I feel like we’re a long ways from escaping this vulnerability.
It seems to me that we hit an enormous growth phase in the last 10 years and invited upon ourselves an Eternal September of Bootcampers and other very green developers who can’t be trusted to do more than glue components together.
Convenient, centralized package managers make these folk way more effective at delivering products in the near term, but there are too few experienced leads around to point out the maintenance and security concerns that play out long-term when you’ve committed yourself to continuously folding in unreviewed code from 1000 unpaid contributors you never vetted and who know nothing about you.
After years of “screaming into the void” (as another commenter put it), I’ve accepted that this is reality and that there are reasons for it: it produces valuable work quickly, and remediates labor pressure by lowing the barrier to entry.
But I can’t shake that we’ve loaded ourselves on a train whose track runs right over a cliff and that the correction, if it happens before we fall off that cliff, will be very expensive and jarring.
It seems to me that we hit an enormous growth phase in the last 10 years and invited upon ourselves an Eternal September of Bootcampers and other very green developers who can’t be trusted to do more than glue components together.
Convenient, centralized package managers make these folk way more effective at delivering products in the near term, but there are too few experienced leads around to point out the maintenance and security concerns that play out long-term when you’ve committed yourself to continuously folding in unreviewed code from 1000 unpaid contributors you never vetted and who know nothing about you.
After years of “screaming into the void” (as another commenter put it), I’ve accepted that this is reality and that there are reasons for it: it produces valuable work quickly, and remediates labor pressure by lowing the barrier to entry.
But I can’t shake that we’ve loaded ourselves on a train whose track runs right over a cliff and that the correction, if it happens before we fall off that cliff, will be very expensive and jarring.