At 52 - and still developing stuff, still advising, etc. - I'm more suffering from "Future Annoyance" than shock. I'm despairing at the seemingly huge wastage going on - the rapid shifting from one javascript framework du jour to the next, the rapid versioning of e.g. Qt from 5 - where I ported one of my apps - and bang we're already at Qt6 now ffs!
And on and on it goes. It seems multiple 1000's of man-hours of work happens in the tech world, only to get dismissed and dumped in favour of $new_exciting_thing, and it's getting annoying and disappointing.
It seems to be a case of rather than iterating on something, someone else comes up with $new_thing and that becomes the fashion du jour for a period of time - lots of people quickly jump ship to the new thing - until /that/ stuff gets dumped in favour of $some_new_new_thing. Repeat ad-nauseum.
I'm undecided on whether that's a bad thing or not - but the pace of the change(s) is what I'm finding more Annoy than Shock.
"Future Annoyance" is definitely the word. I know it's not just me because it hits our entire team all at once when something stops working.
We deal with a lot of clients so we use Skype, Teams, GotoMeeting, Zoom, you name it. But Skype regularly causes collective "WTH!?" in our team. Skype devs seem to love moving things around without warning. Or putting features like "ring group" being an extra button after you "call group". Most recently they moved how you close a picture when you're in a call. Why they did this I have no idea. But I saw it catch multiple people on my team.
Honestly, I'm tired of it. The cognitive load of all of this is too high. I have work to do.
edit: I should add an observation. Whenever a feature is first changed or simply moved, it almost certainly means it's not going to work. Quality in this day and age is non-existent.
At my previous job, we used Webex Teams. It was fine when it worked, but it always had annoying bugs. There was a new release every month or so, and while the annoying bugs often went away, they were inevitably replaced by new annoying bugs.
At my new job, they use Microsoft Teams. While I haven't experienced most of the problems being described here, I'm not particularly impressed. I did have to spend about 15 minutes one day trying to get a call to work with a coworker, because it kept totally locking up. I finally solved the problem by disconnecting my microphone, even though I had used it successfully earlier that day. Teams working again with my Samson mic, but who knows when it will poop the bed again.
Kids nowadays have no respect making single-page applications on their iPad. Seriously though, the old days of writing software from scratch are gone. This reliance on frameworks and the associated toolchain complexity is a big mistake. There is a reason C is still loved after 50 years and that is because it is simple. It's too bad we're going backwards.
You can cite me for one! I didn't even grow up on it, it was honestly a more recent thing for me to pick up seriously, I wrote significant amounts of JavaScript, Ruby, Go, Rust and various LISPS before I seriously used C in anger. Nowadays it's the language I reach for second most often after JS and it's honestly something I often really look forward to writing. I love how it just gets out of my way and lets me do things, it's so fucking refreshing.
I'm undecided on whether that's a bad thing or not - but the pace of the change(s) is what I'm finding more Annoy than Shock.
The most dangerous aspect of this phenomenon is that the platforms our applications run on are now highly unstable. We live in an era when software like operating systems and browsers will happily update itself whether we want it to or not. You can't build a castle on sand and expect it to stand when the tide comes in.
At least if the platforms provided stable, standardised foundations, those application developers who wanted to provide software with longevity and compatibility could do so. But the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google seemingly have no interest at all in providing those stable foundations any more. If everything is throwaway junk then everyone needs to buy the new throwaway junk next week too.
When I first started writing Python apps using Pyside/Qt4, it was just before the transition to Pyside2/Qt5.
I put off moving my Captain's Log app from one to the other until I couldn't put it off any longer. Then, it seems only a year or less, we have Qt6 now.
I think my timing was more down to the production readiness of Pyside2, which meant I had to hold onto using PySide and hence Qt4 before PySide2 was ready/mature enough to trust porting my existing app to.
And on and on it goes. It seems multiple 1000's of man-hours of work happens in the tech world, only to get dismissed and dumped in favour of $new_exciting_thing, and it's getting annoying and disappointing.
It seems to be a case of rather than iterating on something, someone else comes up with $new_thing and that becomes the fashion du jour for a period of time - lots of people quickly jump ship to the new thing - until /that/ stuff gets dumped in favour of $some_new_new_thing. Repeat ad-nauseum.
I'm undecided on whether that's a bad thing or not - but the pace of the change(s) is what I'm finding more Annoy than Shock.