I did my internship at Nortel. A decade later and having worked from small shops to IBM and beyond, nothing comes close to the quality of people/code that I saw at Nortel.
Software gets shittier because speed of development and time to market continues to outweigh any reason for quality. Code written 20-30 years ago almost always looks cleaner to me than the code I'm working on today :(
> Code written 20-30 years ago almost always looks cleaner to me than the code I'm working on today :(
You aren't looking at the average workaday C program from that era. I guarantee you that OpenSSL, for example, does not look cleaner than code of today.
Many people don't have the luxury of write and jump ship. The vast majority of my career was not greenfield development. It has almost all been maintaining pre-existing software. Some of which is more than a decade old.
The challenging part of us in the software maintenance job is to balance a need to refactor with a need to add features. It colors your opinion about a lot of things. You start to evaluate methodologies, technologies, frameworks, and even library choices by their impact on long term maintainability.
I frequently find myself at odds with a primarily greenfield developer in tool choice because I'm looking forward into the future and it doesn't look pretty.
Greenfield developers look at me funny when I say we should just use Spring or .net for new projects. I actually have to maintain my projects for years, and I've been burnt many times before.
Nortel was an unbelievable loss. To this day you still see Nortel phones in every corner of the world. If they hadn't over-extended themselves they'd probably still be on top of that market.
Even more disappointing was that RIM/Blackberry had every opportunity to take that mantle (business/enterprise IP telephony) and didn't even try.
I did my internship at Nortel. A decade later and having worked from small shops to IBM and beyond, nothing comes close to the quality of people/code that I saw at Nortel.
From another perspective:
It is up to you to carry the torch now.