Cynical Software -

, including its own internal components, external dependencies, and human users. Popularized by Michael Nygard in the book Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

Software engineers should be a little bit cynical - sean goedecke cynical software

2. Enterprise SaaS (The Trapdoor Edition) You sign up for a project management tool for $10/month. Three years later, you have 400GB of data, complex automations, and 50 employees trained on it. The vendor raises the price to $18/month, then $29/month, then introduces a "per-seat-per-API-call" fee. They know you cannot leave. The software doesn't need to be good anymore. It just needs to be migratable enough to make switching cost $40,000 in labor. That isn't a software company; that is a ransomware operation with a .com domain. Three years later, you have 400GB of data,

If you write perfect, elegant, immutable code that solves the wrong problem, or worse, solves the right problem but misses the arbitrary deadline, you have failed. Your beautiful abstraction is worthless if the user can’t click the button to give the company money. The software doesn't need to be good anymore