It sounds like you find cheating shameful for vague moralistic reasons that you have not disclosed.
Software is full of cheating. I am really convinced that maybe 85% (that's actually being generous) of developers have no idea what they are doing. They know enough to complete some tiny agile tasks and push a few lines into a pull request. These people are either suffering from imposter syndrome, deliberately cheating, or just don't care. All the real decisions are made by that last 15%. That's why almost nobody can write software anymore without a plethora of open source software delivering most of their product for them.
In my mind if you aren't part of that last 15% you are cheating whether or not its deliberate. Everybody wants to get paid.
If you want to reduce the amount of cheating in software then the industry must be willing to impose minimal standards of acceptable practice. The industry is not willing to do so.
There are a couple of reasons why such prolific cheating is allowed (and even encouraged):
* Developers are not taught to plan. I take this for granted being a military guy, but seriously I have seen many children with a greater planning ability than many developers tasked with a new product effort. Its like the abstractness of software completely destroys any capability to put simple steps in order. This is why many businesses will offload this to business analysts and project managers.
* Developers are not taught to write. Although many of these people have bachelor's degrees so many cannot put their thoughts into even a simple bullet list.
* There are no ethics in software. The closest thing for most developers might be something like an NDA at initial on boarding. Otherwise, ethics is entirely off loaded to a legal team who mandate areas of compliance.
* The goals of hiring/employment often do not align to the skills required to perform product delivery. This indicates employers have completely lost faith in candidate preparation and/or candidate availability and are just willing to take what they can get. Typically that means dumbing things down to widen the pool of availability.
* Many developers are grossly entitled. The most important word for most developers: easiness. Comparatively nothing else matters, and they will fight you to death on this.
"Developers are not taught to write. Although many of these people have bachelor's degrees so many cannot put their thoughts into even a simple bullet list." This is 100% true and it's frustrating. I think it applies to almost everybody though, not just developers.
I think an alternative to higher standards would be lower pay. I am convinced that would weed out many of the people who don't actually care about software engineering. IMO, the majority of software development is not that difficult and lots of companies are overpaying for people who are just plumbing data from point A to point B and using libraries they didn't develop and have a weak understanding of.
I think you're being unfairly downvoted here, and you bring up a lot of good points.
> It sounds like you find cheating shameful for vague moralistic reasons that you have not disclosed.
That's absolutely right. I didn't elaborate at all.
> That's why almost nobody can writing software anymore
Honestly though I think that writing software is just hard.
> must be willing to impose minimal standards of acceptable practice
Yeah this is an interesting idea. Like how attorneys have to pass a bar. I don't really know how it would go, but I do believe that the industry already has a hard enough of a time hiring and this would just make things that much harder. Some organizations though seem to have a knack for improving their new hires by a lot, so it's not like all these organizations are evil, just most are probably incompetent. Again, software is hard.
> The goals of hiring/employment often do not align to the skills required to perform product delivery.
Yeah, I would say in general that bad incentives are abound.
I think a lot of the points you brought up are products of strange market dynamics. For so long companies haven't really felt the weight of gravity and have had so much investor money that it feels like a lot of what one could consider fundamentals have been tossed out the window in favor of other things. This is where perverse incentives start to manifest in my view.
> There are a couple of reasons why such prolific cheating is allowed (and even encouraged):
Not sure how the listed points would be mitigated by cheating.
Further:
> There are no ethics in software.
Well, speak for yourself, but obviously many developers are greatly concerned about the license of their product as well as of the tools they use.
> Many developers are grossly entitled. The most important word for most developers: easiness. Comparatively nothing else matters, and they will fight you to death on this.
Well, many might be, but insisting on easiness might have another reason: it's always more difficult than it seems in the beginning and if a project ought to have a chance of becoming successful it ought to seem easy. That's just speaking from experience. If you want to get to the moon, you better plan for an Apollo-size budget and a few explosions.
Software is full of cheating. I am really convinced that maybe 85% (that's actually being generous) of developers have no idea what they are doing. They know enough to complete some tiny agile tasks and push a few lines into a pull request. These people are either suffering from imposter syndrome, deliberately cheating, or just don't care. All the real decisions are made by that last 15%. That's why almost nobody can write software anymore without a plethora of open source software delivering most of their product for them.
In my mind if you aren't part of that last 15% you are cheating whether or not its deliberate. Everybody wants to get paid.
If you want to reduce the amount of cheating in software then the industry must be willing to impose minimal standards of acceptable practice. The industry is not willing to do so.
There are a couple of reasons why such prolific cheating is allowed (and even encouraged):
* Developers are not taught to plan. I take this for granted being a military guy, but seriously I have seen many children with a greater planning ability than many developers tasked with a new product effort. Its like the abstractness of software completely destroys any capability to put simple steps in order. This is why many businesses will offload this to business analysts and project managers.
* Developers are not taught to write. Although many of these people have bachelor's degrees so many cannot put their thoughts into even a simple bullet list.
* There are no ethics in software. The closest thing for most developers might be something like an NDA at initial on boarding. Otherwise, ethics is entirely off loaded to a legal team who mandate areas of compliance.
* The goals of hiring/employment often do not align to the skills required to perform product delivery. This indicates employers have completely lost faith in candidate preparation and/or candidate availability and are just willing to take what they can get. Typically that means dumbing things down to widen the pool of availability.
* Many developers are grossly entitled. The most important word for most developers: easiness. Comparatively nothing else matters, and they will fight you to death on this.
Edit: two grammar corrections.