I am not struggling to believe it at all. Because I am an old guy with a CS degree but decades of web development experience. Apparently this is called being "a legacy developer".
This is the logical conclusion of the indiscipline of undereducated developers who have copied and pasted throughout their career.
This reality is then expressed as "but humans also copy and paste" as if this makes it OK to just hand that task over now to an AI that might do it better, where the solution is to train people to not copy and paste.
Everything about AI is the same story, over and over again: just pump it out. Consequences are what lawyers are for.
It's really interesting to me that within basically a generation we've gone from people sneering at developers with old fashioned, niche development skills and methodologies (fortran, cobol, Ada) to sneering at people with the old-fashioned mindset that knowing what your code is doing is a fundamental facet of the job.
+1. By now I've given up hope that software development will ever become a true engineering discipline, or even just somewhat close to it. Bungling it is so much cheaper and practically everyone seems to accept the current bad state of affairs. Only small subfields are exceptions to this.
I pretty much don’t know a team that doesn’t have at least testing/staging environments. I don’t know a team that doesn’t use GIT and some issue tracker.
That’s already engineering. Your sentiment is cute but I think you have some romantic vision of what „real engineering” is.
Those are (trivial) software project management. It's a tiny part of the picture.
Software engineering goes a lot deeper than that; look at any serious accredited syllabus.
But almost nobody practises it these days, you are right. The web kind of blurred the line between software and document for a while and a lot of stuff got lost.
This is the logical conclusion of the indiscipline of undereducated developers who have copied and pasted throughout their career.
This reality is then expressed as "but humans also copy and paste" as if this makes it OK to just hand that task over now to an AI that might do it better, where the solution is to train people to not copy and paste.
Everything about AI is the same story, over and over again: just pump it out. Consequences are what lawyers are for.
It's really interesting to me that within basically a generation we've gone from people sneering at developers with old fashioned, niche development skills and methodologies (fortran, cobol, Ada) to sneering at people with the old-fashioned mindset that knowing what your code is doing is a fundamental facet of the job.