Can confirm. I saw some fresh out of college colleagues do this in text docs. Al nice markup, but the text content was very drafty. I always sent them back to keep the format concept-y if you are tuning the text first.
This is happening at my place as well. I am a senior leader, but I find it hard to push back on this. I something looks plausible and everyone has reacted with a thumbs up (but probably only skimmed the document), when is the first one saying “what is this shit?”
The length itself is not an indicator per se, but you can sense when it is not honest. If others do not have a sense for it, it seems like complaining about something new.
I think we have enough anecdata that users don’t like a changing interface. They like keeping things the same, mostly.
So how can you keep generating disposable software on this layer?
And what you mostly want to change in software, is new features or handle more usage. If you do that, it needs in most cases changes to the data store and the “hand crafted core”.
So what part in practice will be disposable and how often will it be “generated again”?
Maybe for simple small stuff, like how fast Excel sheets are being made, changed and discarded? Maybe for embedded software?
This reminds me of the story where Barclays had to buy bad assets from the Lehman bankruptcy because they only hid the rows of assets they did not want, but the receiver saw all the rows due to a mistake somewhere. The kind of 2% fault rate in Excel that could tank a big bank.
It is not “companies” but individuals. But yes, there are a lot of people that are only driven by greed and power. But not all by a long shot. I believe most of society would fail if everyone was doing the maximum they could get away with. So, there should be a lot of people that don’t seek the maximum they can get away with.
But I agree that a lot of companies are so big and so faceless, that they do too much bad stuff and lots of people in the company would just shrug it off with “it is not my job to say something”.
I don’t think this is universally true. At least not here in the Netherlands, but even in visiting the US it does not feel like that everywhere.
I think it is very sad the moral standards are so low. I find that even harder when mixed with “why does the government get involved in everything?” attitude.
I also don’t lead my company of 27 people that way.