His Developer News column appears every Wednesday. By Doug Scott. Be careful what you reward for By motivating developers with ever-faster and more powerful hardware, managers guarantee software bloat. Such is the way of the world. Software continues to get bigger and slower, and only by continually upgrading the hardware can users keep up.
Software bloat is a perennial problem for users, yet developers are unrepentant .
Users want reliability above all else. That toolset uses other toolsets which grow over the years, and so on. For programmers, these tools are fun to deploy and use. Software bloat is inevitable until we understand and deal with programmers' desire for the latest, greatest tools. In other industries , the general approach is to tweak the financial package awarded to staff.