Exactly. As a non-software engineer, people talk about software as some fine art on here while my experience as a user is that most software basically sucks in one way or another.
Your experience is a perfect reflection of reality. Most software is not well done.
In trades I found people were very opinionated about the Right Way to do things, but we tended to cut corners constantly there as well. People who work in a craft seem to like the idea of doing things right more than they actually do things right in practice. We end up with gaps in our flooring, ugly solder joints in our plumbing, creaking decks, cracked concrete, and a cookie disclaimer that returns every time you refresh the page.
> In trades I found people were very opinionated about the Right Way to do things,
My experience of moving from tech to doing a lot of home renovations and dealing with hundreds of trades people is that it was just like tech. 90% of people in 90% of environments are just trying to make it work so they can collect their pay-cheque and go home.
High quality output in any domain is a result of stumbling across the 10% of genuinely passionate people, and creating the 10% environment for them to want to be passionate in. If you don't luck out with that, everything will still work, it'll just be a bit rough round the edges.
Amen - As a SWE and i've come to realize that no one pays for me to treat code as craftman quality so I don't. The whole agile mindset is get something out that demonstrates value and fix it things while you go. And in ten years i've also realized that my ability to sit down and make something really special the first time through is - shit. This is the first time i've been able to meet timelines while still producing a better product.
This is true for most of the software these days (except for professional software like Photoshop and the like) without LLMs.