I am sad and disappointed at the current state of software engineering.
Everything just feels worse. And yes, I know people say that "nostalgia makes everything look better", but I don't think this is the case anymore.
I've been an iOS user since 2012 (had my own iPhone 5), and back then it felt alive. I'm not sure what's going on now, but iOS just feels rough around the edges. Google's products still look like they were designed by five teams that aren't aware of each other. Google maps particularly has gotten noticeably worse. I have never had major issues with navigation in the late 2010s, but recently it can't even figure out the direction I'm facing correctly.
GitHub as well, it keeps getting slower, feels more bloated, and worse than before. Microsoft keeps adding layers of complexity but never actually improving the experience. Same with Windows, I was a really big Windows 7 user back then, but now I don't want to touch windows again. Even Cloudflare, the one company everyone trusted to be rock solid, started having major outages recently. And the reasons behind the outages are even more ridiculous.
Everywhere you look, the quality bar is dropping.
It feels like no one is taking software seriously anymore. Everything ships half-finished, layered on top of five other blackbox abstractions, and all optimized for "feature velocity" instead of correctness. A lot of "high signal" companies brag about shipping fast, not shipping well. And the scariest part about all this is that it's become normalized.
I think a lot of this has to do with how business and economic incentives invaded software. Yes I get it, life is slightly harder nowadays, but that doesn't justify destroying a beautiful field of study. Software used to be built by people who cared about systems, performance, correctness, and elegance. Now it's built by people chasing metrics, growth targets, and engagement charts. You'll never see someone build something adjacent to the C++ programming language again. Now everything is a dashboard and a KPI. Decisions get made by people who don't even understand software's limits, and engineers are basically told to bend reality until the next quarterly review.
And then there's an incoming wave of AI slopware. To be honest I'm not blaming AI, AI didn't do anything wrong. The tools themselves I support, but the attitude is the problem. People see AI as a shortcut to ship faster, but the code it generates has no fundamentals or any sense of ownership, it's an even worse version of the "move fast, hope for the best" mentality that got us here. AI didn't create the slop, it amplified our laziness.
But what bothers me more is the public image of software engineering and the attitude behind all this. No one truly cares about the craft anymore. The passion is fading, and most people in big tech that I've seen are just coasting, collecting comp, moving Jira tickets, and doing the bare minimum. It's not about building something people would love anymore, it's just surviving another stupid sprint. Meanwhile, the few people who actually love this field are yelling into the void and getting zero support.
And don't get me wrong, I am in no position to say any of this as I'm still just a student, learning and figuring things out. It's just very depressing to watch an industry that I love, that is built on curiosity and rigor, get replaced with an industry built on metrics and vibes. Recruitment should care more about people who want to build good software, people who actually enjoy the beauty of it, not just the ones chasing the highest bidder. And as for venture capitals, I have more research to do before I can comment.
I don't think people are necessarily dumber or that the problems got harder, I've actually met a lot of passionate and talented people, especially in ML research. So real engineers still exist, they are just rarer. I hope the industry eventually remembers why their kind mattered in the first place and make the correct decisions to move the field forward.