Actually I'm not sure I buy this guy's rant. The oldest comments in the link at the bottom poke some holes in it.

Although this exchange was funny:



[quote=KP Freds]
phd_student_doom, I honestly can't tell if your post is satire or not.

Assuming it's not, go hang up your keyboard and stick to the amateur leagues. In the same way that an amateur woodworker should not be building houses, an amateur programmer should not be writing software.

Poul Henning-Kamp doesn't address this, but a side-effect of the IT boom -- including the current VC bubble -- was that anyone that could remotely do the job was hired. This lead to inexperienced engineers having a voice and role grossly disproportionate to their abilities, and ultimately, lead to 15+ years of wheel re-invention and history repetition amongst junior engineers who lacked any adult supervision.

In fact, companies such as ycombinator are fueled by and intentionally encourage youthful naivety, as they require a steady stream of heady grist for the VC mill. All it takes for them to turn tremendous profits is one successful exit out of a hundred failures.

Your distasteful lack of respect for expertise and experience is the result of this lack of adult supervision.
[/quote]

The main hole I can think of is that nobody's really using autoconf anymore. Instead they're using things like CMake ("autotools done right", so it's a **** cathedral, but still a cathedral) or highly opinionated build systems like Blaze/Bazel/Buck/Pants (about as cathedral-y as you can get).

Agreed completely that the esr script kiddie clan has festooned unix in a sea of garbage (php being the pinnacle of it) but it's not like people don't want to work in or on cathedrals. The problem is cut rate mismanagement keeping people slaving away in bazaars doing Agile and racking up unaffordable tech debts because it's somehow "cheaper" than thinking and planning and actually putting an engineer in charge of engineering.