[Nerdfest]

In my (probably worthless) opinion, the two big problems affecting software industry are:

- Organizations, especially large ones, now trust their process over their people. In the "old" days, when a production problem was identified and the prime developer knew what the problem was, it would be fixed, as directly and immediately as possible if there was high confidence. With less than high confidence, maybe a quick test in a test environment is done. In many places, this is now a multi-day, or even multi-week process now.

- Developers are not all doing it because they love it anymore. It's a high-ish paying job with lots of hiring being done. Many of the people writing code these days are awful programmers that in the long run cause a lot of damage. Many take away more than they add. In the earlier days, people coded because they wanted to.

The second problem is actually a big part of the cause of the first.

Perhaps I'm just bitter, but given the abundance of technologies, frameworks, libraries, services, etc, small teams of good coders can put together amazing pieces of work in a very short time. This almost never happens. It seems like complexity of large software projects has exceeded the ability of the current level of general expertise to maintain. It sure seems like we're close to that point.

I should add that I don't have the same opinions on most modern techniques. Agile can work very well. Code reviews and unit tests are a must. These are all tools that boost the quality and in the end, save time as well.