You've thrown together a bunch of buzzwords and asked if we are over complicating things.
Buzzwords can mean freaking anything. I've seen great Agile teams that don't look anything like textbook Agile teams. Microservices can be a total clusterfuck unless you know what the hell you're doing -- and manage complexity. (Sound familiar?) CI/CD/DevOps can be anything from a lifesaver to the end of all life in the known universe.
So yes, we are over complicating software development, but the way we do it isn't through slapping around a few marketing terms. The way we do it is not understanding what our jobs are. Instead, we pick up some term that somebody, somewhere used and run with it.
Then we confuse effort with value. Hey, if DevOps is good, the more we do DevOps, the better we'll be, right? Well -- no. If Agile is good, the more Agile stuff we do the better we'll be, right? Hell no. We love to deep dive in the technical details. If there aren't any technical details, we'll add some!
Software development is too complicated because individual developers veer off the rails and make it too complicated. That's it. That's all there is to it. Throw a complex library at a good dev and they'll ask if we need the entire thing to only use 2 methods. Throw a complex library at a mediocre Dev and they'll spend the next three weeks writing 15 KLOC creating the ultimate system for X, which we don't need right now and may never need.
It has nothing to do with the buzzwords, the tech, or software development in general. It's us.
Buzzwords can mean freaking anything. I've seen great Agile teams that don't look anything like textbook Agile teams. Microservices can be a total clusterfuck unless you know what the hell you're doing -- and manage complexity. (Sound familiar?) CI/CD/DevOps can be anything from a lifesaver to the end of all life in the known universe.
So yes, we are over complicating software development, but the way we do it isn't through slapping around a few marketing terms. The way we do it is not understanding what our jobs are. Instead, we pick up some term that somebody, somewhere used and run with it.
Then we confuse effort with value. Hey, if DevOps is good, the more we do DevOps, the better we'll be, right? Well -- no. If Agile is good, the more Agile stuff we do the better we'll be, right? Hell no. We love to deep dive in the technical details. If there aren't any technical details, we'll add some!
Software development is too complicated because individual developers veer off the rails and make it too complicated. That's it. That's all there is to it. Throw a complex library at a good dev and they'll ask if we need the entire thing to only use 2 methods. Throw a complex library at a mediocre Dev and they'll spend the next three weeks writing 15 KLOC creating the ultimate system for X, which we don't need right now and may never need.
It has nothing to do with the buzzwords, the tech, or software development in general. It's us.