I totally agree with you. I think that most corporations are in a state of suspended myopia.
We’d rather direct engineers to improve the effectiveness of a single system by 200% (even though it impacts 1% of revenue), than to impact all (or many) systems by 5%.
Yet, most of the impressive software we admire today was built in the environment you prescribe. C and UNIX, famously, but also git, Go, Rust. I imagine many others.
How much has C improved productivity, over Assembly and COBOL? How much has Borg or BigTable?
The issue, IMO, is that no ambitious manager wants to invest the social capital in defending and advocating for these teams, because they don’t look good until they look exceptionally good.
We’d rather direct engineers to improve the effectiveness of a single system by 200% (even though it impacts 1% of revenue), than to impact all (or many) systems by 5%.
Yet, most of the impressive software we admire today was built in the environment you prescribe. C and UNIX, famously, but also git, Go, Rust. I imagine many others.
How much has C improved productivity, over Assembly and COBOL? How much has Borg or BigTable?
The issue, IMO, is that no ambitious manager wants to invest the social capital in defending and advocating for these teams, because they don’t look good until they look exceptionally good.