There's also pressure to have "visibility" and "impact" for career progression. That leads people to wasting time and resources building things for personal clout to play the promo game, rather than to solve actual problems.
We then have a secondary ecosystem of people jumping on to those new and trendy things for the same reason within their own organisations.
> I actually wouldn’t blame software developers per se. I would somewhat blame the habits they develop along the way. Nobody is taught to write real software in university computer science programs. They are taught to code, and if they are lucky enough learn the fundamentals of software development/software engineering.
It's not the habits they develop; it's the pressure from management to "just deliver the darn thing so we can get paid, so we can pay YOU the employees!".
A company can produce software that is two of fast to make, good, or cheap to make. A publicly traded company seems legally obligated to not choose good, because fiduciary responsibility is interpreted as what's good for short term gain.
There's a lot of garbage because the scale of software today is immensely greater than even 20 years ago, and than 40 years ago.
And that is true of all and anything that grows in scale.
Anything that reaches industrial scale generates trash and garbage, often discarded, unless a second-hand or third-hand business sets in to collect, transform and value it. And that requires regulation.
Clothing? What percentage of what you have in your closet do you wear regularly? What's the rest? What's the quality of it? Does it last 10 years? 5? no? garbage. Do you even picture the volume of clothing that's trashed by manufacturers even _before_ being sold? or that is trashed _not to be sold anymore_ (because, the brand strategy demands it - hello fashion & luxury industries).
Food? Do you know what proportion of perfectly edible food is trashed before being sold, or after it "looks bad" while still perfectly edible? How much food do you trash that you bought or cooked, in average, every month? Multiply this by your country's population.
So software? Do you know what was the scope/budget/timeframe of the build of the software you are using, initially? Do you know if there are even still maintenance developers staffed at the moment you're using it? Do you expect it to be fixed/improved/optimized for hardware/energy efficiency? Will not happen without regulations.
Software engineering (and not only computer science) is a part of the answer. Regulation is an other.
We then have a secondary ecosystem of people jumping on to those new and trendy things for the same reason within their own organisations.