The problem is that our industry, unlike every other single industry except acting and modeling (and note neither are known for “intelligence”) worship at the altar of youth. I don’t know the number of people I’ve encountered who tell me that by being older, my experience is worthless since all the stuff I’ve learned has become obsolete.

This, despite the fact that the dominant operating systems used in most systems is based on an operating system that is nearly 50 years old, the “new” features being added to many “modern” languages are really concepts from languages that are between 50 and 60 years old or older, and most of the concepts we bandy about as cutting edge were developed from 20 to 50 years ago.

It also doesn’t help that the youth whose accomplishments we worship usually get concepts wrong. I don’t know the number of times I’ve seen someone claim code was refactored along some new-fangled “improvement” over an “outdated” design pattern who wrote objects that bare no resemblance to the pattern they claim to be following. (In the case above, the classes they used included “modules” and “models”, neither which are part of the VIPER backronym.) And when I indicate that the “massive view controller” problem often represents a misunderstanding as to what constitutes a model and what constitutes a view, I’m told that I have no idea what I’m talking about–despite having more experience than the critic has been alive, and despite graduating from Caltech–meaning I’m probably not a complete idiot.)

Our industry is rife with arrogance, and often the arrogance of the young and inexperienced. Our industry seems to value “cowboys” despite doing everything it can (with the management technique “flavor of the month”) to stop “cowboys.” Our industry is agist, sexist, one where the blind leads the blind, and seminal works attempting to understand the problem of development go ignored.

How many of you have seen code which seems developed using “design pattern” roulette? Don’t know what you’re doing? Spin the wheel!

Ours is also one of the fewest industries based on scientific research which blatantly ignores the research, unless it is popularized in shallow books which rarely explore anything in depth. We have a constant churn of technologies which are often pointless, introducing new languages using extreme hype which is often unwarranted as those languages seldom expand beyond a basic domain representing a subset of LISP. I can’t think of a single developer I’ve met professionally who belong to the ACM or to IEEE, and when they run into an interesting problem tend to search Github or Stack Overflow, even when it is a basic algorithm problem. (I’ve met programmers with years of experience who couldn’t write code to maintain a linked list.)

So what do we do?

Beats the hell out of me. You cannot teach if your audience revels in its ignorance and doesn’t think all that “old junk” has any value. You cannot teach if your students have no respect for experience and knowledge. You cannot teach if your audience is both unaware of their ignorance and disinterested in learning anything not hyped in “The Churn.”

Sometimes there are a rare few out there who do want to learn; for those it is worth spending your time. It’s been my experience that most software developers who don’t bother to develop their skills and who are not interested in learning from those with experience often burn out after a few years. In today’s current mobile development expansion, there is still more demand than supply of programmers, but like that will change, as it did with the dot-com bubble, and a lot of those who have no interest in honing their skills (either out of arrogance or ignorance) will find themselves in serious trouble.

Ultimately, as an individual I don’t know if there is anything those of us who have been around for a while can do very much of anything, except offer our wisdom and experience to whomever may want to learn. As someone who has been around for a while it is also incumbent on us to continue to learn and hone our skills; just this past few years I picked up another couple of programming languages and have been playing around with a new operating system.

And personally I have little hope. Sure, there is a lot of cutting edge stuff taking place, but as an industry we’re also producing a lot of crap. We’ve created working environments that are hostile (and I see sexism as the canary in the coal-mine of a much deeper cultural problem), and we are creating software which is increasingly hostile to its users, despite decades of research showing us alternatives. We are increasingly ignoring team structures that worked well in the 1980’s and 1990’s: back then we saw support staff (such as QA and QAE and tech writers) who worked alongside software developers; today in the teams I’ve worked for I’m hard pressed to find more than one or two QA alongside teams of a dozen or more developers. I haven’t seen a technical writer embedded in a development team (helping to document API interfaces and internal workings) for at least 20 years. And we are increasingly being seen as line workers in a factory rather than technically creative workers.

I’m not bitter; I just believe we’ve fallen into a bunch of bad habits in our industry which need a good recession and some creative destruction to weed out what is limping along. And I hope that others will eventually realize what we’ve lost and where we’re failing.

But for me; I’ll just keep plugging along; a 50+ year old developer in an industry where 30 is considered “old”, writing software and quietly fixing flaws created by those who can’t be bothered to understand that “modules” are not part of VIPER or that MVC can include database access methods in the “model” and who believe all code is “self-documenting.”

And complaining about the problems when asked.