A pleasing fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless. The world runs on software these days. Everything around you has software in it, at every level: firmware, micro-code, operating system, drivers, server, client, network, etc. And the vast majority of it was written by mediocre programmers. There's simply too much production code in the world for it to be any other way.
Yes, mediocre programmers create mediocre code, and they have a harder time maintaining that code, but they still manage. Often times they have the advantage of money, resources, and people. With enough devs and a reasonable process it is possible to "polish a turd" into something that is functional and feature rich, even if it has a great many flaws.
This is the scary realization that most devs, including myself, have a hard time accepting. The software that your bank runs on? Yeah, that was written by hundreds of devs and if you interviewed each one you would probably only recommend hiring a tiny handful. The firmware your hard disk runs on? Same deal. Also your car's EFI module, your cable modem, your DVR, etc.
I was thinking on this a bit today and I realized that we're actually a little bit better off in the software world, since good software can be copied infinitely. So well written operating system kernels, server applications, libraries, etc. can have a huge impact on the overall software landscape, regardless of how few people contributed code.
But even so, there is still far too much code out there which is the culmination of mountains of mediocrity. It is rather frightening to think about, considering that everything these days relies on software.
Yes, mediocre programmers create mediocre code, and they have a harder time maintaining that code, but they still manage. Often times they have the advantage of money, resources, and people. With enough devs and a reasonable process it is possible to "polish a turd" into something that is functional and feature rich, even if it has a great many flaws.
This is the scary realization that most devs, including myself, have a hard time accepting. The software that your bank runs on? Yeah, that was written by hundreds of devs and if you interviewed each one you would probably only recommend hiring a tiny handful. The firmware your hard disk runs on? Same deal. Also your car's EFI module, your cable modem, your DVR, etc.