The last six decades of commercial programming don't exactly bear this out...
The real lesson is that writing software is such a useful, high-leverage activity that even absolutely awful software can be immensely valuable. But that doesn't tell us that better software is useless, it just tells us it is not absolutely necessary.
Caring about craft in programming is more like a photographer caring about light and composition and creativity and taste than a photographer caring about equipment.
In some ways yes. Many “engineers” obsess over “idioms” and other trends to the detriment of performance, correctness and usability. So this analogy is a bit too charitable.
I'm not sure that's a valid analogy. Light, composition and creativity are all experienced directly by viewer, and essentially describe what it is that we notice and appreciate in photography (even if subconciously). The best analogy I can think of to programming is the UX/UI of the application. Given equaly competent developers, nobody is going to notice or care if your application was written in Rust or Cold Fusion.
But the original analogy is flawed too. I wouldn't consider caring about the craft of programming to be similar to obsessing over your photography equipment. GAS is about consumerism and playing with gadgets, at the end of the day.
Caring about the craft of programming is more about being an artist who takes pride in crafting something beautiful, even if they're the only ones experiencing it. I am most definitley not one of those programmers, but have always had nothing but immense respect for those that are.
It's amazing how such a short comment manages to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of stimulants, tinkering, human nature and, implicitly, neurodivergence.
Struggling with poorly organized docs seems entirely like incidental complexity to me. Good learning resources can be both faster and better pedagogically. (How good today's LLM-based chat tools are is a totally separate question.)
Nobody said anything about poorly organized docs. Reading well structured and organized complex material is immensely difficult. Anyone who’s read Hegel can attest to that.
And yet I wouldn’t trust a single word coming out of the mouth of someone who couldn’t understand Hegel so they read an AI summary instead.
There is value in struggling through difficult things.
You're significantly underestimating fully-loaded cost per person + other expenses. An engineer making a $200k salary is going to cost the company something like $300k, and there are some additional fixed overheads. And $200k is quite a bit less than your competitors are paying.
So you're looking at something more like 150 employees total of which <100 are going to be pure engineers, and that's stretching your budget and operations pretty aggressively while also fighting an uphill battle for recruiting skilled and experienced engineers. (And browser development definitely needs a core of experienced engineers with a relatively niche set of skills!)
Working at Mozilla should be more than money. $200k/year is more than enough to be happy in most of the world. You don't need to compete on rock stars that must live in San Francisco, and focus on people that are happy with a high paying job and have enough idealism to accept "only" $200k/year.
None of those figures are what the engineer makes, they're costs. And they're illustrative, not literal. You won't pay everyone at the same rate either for example, and not all will be engineers either, and I totally left both those facts out of it. Oh no! And also omitted the fact that a company whose vision and ideals people agree with can hire said people for less money, which again brings us back around to the point that the vision might be more important.
If something is marginally better, it's not guaranteed to win out because markets aren't perfectly rational. However if something is 10x better than its competitors it will almost always win.
That's because embarrassingly bad writing is useless, while embarrassingly bad code can still make the computer do (roughly) the right thing and lets you tick off a Jira ticket. So we end up having way more room for awful code than for awful prose.
Reading good code can be a better way to learn about something than reading prose. Writing code like that takes some real skill and insight, just like writing clear explanations.
Some writing is functional, e.g. a letter notifying someone of some information. For that type of writing even bad quality can achieve its purpose. Indeed probably the majority of words written are for functional reasons.
The overall trend has been the opposite though, hasn't it? People used to buy a new phone (or new laptop/etc) every couple of years because the underlying tech was improving so quickly, but now that the improvements have slowed down, they're holding onto their devices for longer.
There was an article[1] going around about that recently, and I'm sure there are more, but it's also a trend I've seen first-hand. (I don't particularly care for the article's framing, I'm just linking to it to illustrate the underlying data.)
There's a high switching cost with substantial information asymmetry. Good places are hard to find in some absolute sense and it's hard to evaluate whether a new team is actually going to be good or not. And even if you do find a good team, there's no guarantee it'll last past the next reorg.
The last six decades of commercial programming don't exactly bear this out...
The real lesson is that writing software is such a useful, high-leverage activity that even absolutely awful software can be immensely valuable. But that doesn't tell us that better software is useless, it just tells us it is not absolutely necessary.
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