Our contemporary corporate and social culture doesn't encourage or reward discipline. We produce mostly throwaway stuff that has to be released as soon as possible on the market, or else the company goes out of business. The incentives for craftsmanship and diligence are just not there.
> Our contemporary corporate and social culture doesn't encourage or reward discipline
I think there is some selection bias here. The majority of particiapants in HN discussion generally people who work for startups and people who work with web technologies. The Silicon Valley culture might be focused around time to market, but there is a large (mostly unheard) group of people who exist in a very different culture. For example: C is still an incredibly popular language (for better or worse), but on HN you won't hear much about it outside the Linux Kernel.
A lot of this enterprise software development suffers from some very different problems (the time to market thing brings benefits in terms of making productivity important) but also has benefits in terms of thinking about investments long term (when done well).
I do get it though; there is a lot of things you can do with code in addition to the minimally viable, but the cost is time and effort (short-term and long-term (e.g. maintenance)), and eventually money will run out.
You have to set a boundary for "good enough" somewhere, else you end up stuck in analysis paralysis or whatever a catchy term is.
That said, today's development tooling helps you have a baseline of quality pretty quickly; languages that do not have memory issues, compilers and typed languages, etc.
Sadly, you are correct, but that’s not new. This has been the case throughout history.
I was just thinking about the difference between “good,” and “excellent.”
If we look at the difference between a Henkels kitchen knife, and a Japanese Takayuki knife, we are talking exponentially divergent costs. The Takayuki is definitely a lot better than the Henkels, but is it twenty times as good, as the price difference might suggest?
But Henkels makes far better knives than most of the disposable crap out there. It costs more; usually two or three times as much as a “standard quality” knife. Worth it, though.
That’s sort of the “sweet spot” I aim for, and we don’t get there, without discipline, consistency, and patience.
Germany seems to be doing quite well in producing exactly those products from the upper-middle tier – mixing a reasonable blend of longevity, ingenuity and ergonomics, at an earthly cost. In the rest of the world and especially in "emerging markets" however, such products are often unaffordable, uncompetitive and even sometimes seen as old-fashioned. A household in India that goes from not having a kitchen cutlery set to having one cannot ever distinguish its level of quality because there is nothing else they can compare it to.
Maybe you think craftsmanship is better in the past because of survivorship bias.
For instance, the 60s and 70s had a lot of great music come out of it, but have you ever gone down a chart of the hits from decades ago and listened to the lesser known artists? Lots of it is bad and utterly forgettable.
Same goes with a lot of other fields. We only remember the best and forget about the rest.
