What if, that might overwhelm you, this doesn’t answer the question at all?

You’re simply pushing the question half a millimeter to the side. Nothing more.

That’s what I’m asking myself with pretty much any “sexy” decoration.

Why put a poster of a nude girl in your locker, break room, bedroom, whatever? The only explanation I can find is performative display of (hetero) masculinity.

I think we (as an industry) need to be honest to ourselves and admit that pretty much everything we’re building is temporary. And not in a philosophical sense. 90% of the code I wrote in my about 10 years of professional work is probably gone by now - sometimes replaced by myself. In another ten years, chances are not a single line of code will have survived.

I mean, look at the username.

This is what’s happening in highly complex software over time. Every larger system has corners like this.

I’ve worked on a system that required that you send invalid XML, because some bloke 10 years ago didn’t know what he’s doing and hardcoded a certain structure.

Easy fix, but our clients relied in the old behavior, and nobody bothered fixing it.