Forty years ago, I had a wonderful high school biology teacher. She let the geeky chess club hang out in her room after school, and taught some interesting classes. I TA'd for her my senior year.
Last year I found her on facebook, just retiring. I shared some good memories I had of her, and updated her on some classmates of mine who had gone on to good things (one MSCS, one CPA, one PhD, one MD). I said I could speak for all of them that she had been the best thing that had happened to us in high school.
Her response was lovely, she remembered us all, and was very appreciative of my contact.
She died of breast cancer only about three months later after a very long fight. I was pleased to have made her feel good about herself right there at the end.
I was on USENET, an ancestor of the internet, in 1981. I knew the personal names of all hundred or so people who posted to USENET news groups. There was a newsgroup called net.general for discussion of anything at all. The average I.Q. of posters was probably 130+. There was political debate, but it was all thoughtful.
In those days, you knew the topology of USENET, so if you wanted to send mail to a person outside of your system, you described the route that reached this person. It wasn't as hard as it sounds, because there were certain systems that had an immense number of connections.
A wise and cynical manager pointed out to me that software purchases are driven by features, not quality. You don't get to assess the quality of software until after the purchase.
All other (feature) things being equal, the first product to market gets the majority of the purchases. So dev teams are in a race to the bottom regarding quality. As long as software is purchased, as long as rival companies compete to provide software, this is an iron law.
To improve software quality in a race to the bottom, we must improve the quality of (young, inexperienced) software developers. But companies don't want to pay for high quality developers, they are content with barely-qualified devs earning the lowest possible wage. They hire young. They hire offshore. They hire minimally skilled talent.
There are places where quality still lives: operating systems, compilers, databases. Places where the software cannot perform its mission if it fails frequently. You have to find one of these jobs, or suppress your gag reflex.
Last year I found her on facebook, just retiring. I shared some good memories I had of her, and updated her on some classmates of mine who had gone on to good things (one MSCS, one CPA, one PhD, one MD). I said I could speak for all of them that she had been the best thing that had happened to us in high school.
Her response was lovely, she remembered us all, and was very appreciative of my contact.
She died of breast cancer only about three months later after a very long fight. I was pleased to have made her feel good about herself right there at the end.