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Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#71

Post by majkinetor »

kaba0 wrote: post #67
majkinetor wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets check out wikipedia: Entropy is a scientific concept as well as a measurable physical property that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty What is your claim, that disorder, randomness and uncertainty DO NOT build up with time? :) > And I agree that tests make refactoring easier. They don't make it easier. They make it POSSIBLE. > And so, what specific quality guarantees…

The topmost claim was that software quality degrades over time, as entropy must increase . Both of these claims are false, as the topmost commenter did actually say correctly - entropy only grows globally, but it is possibly to decrease it locally at the expense of some larger increase somewhere else (think of a fridge - it decreases the randomness of molecules inside (cooler) by heating the outside). If we accept th…

Those must be rare like unicorns :)

I don't deal with academic theory and strange special cases - I deal with real, everyday world. You can basically argue out any position if you are clever enough but that doesn't prove anything except that you are clever.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#73

Post by rocknor »

devwastaken wrote: post #69

Take someone who wants to work in software, watch as they learn little about creating software while getting a compsci degree. Tech companies for decades have refused to fund education yet play CS trivia in hiring. There's a reason the system is setup this way. It's not an accident, it's intentionally designed to take kids that follow orders, load them with debt and make them work for less - this is how they are able…

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#74

Post by analog31 »

My mom taught programming at a community college in the 80s, and I graduated from high school in '82. Based on the experiences of her students after taking her course, I would have qualified for a programming job, having learned BASIC and Pascal fairly thoroughly. I don't know if the same level of proficiency (assuming a more modern language choice) would get me a job today.

Thankfully the Shadow IT Department has lower standards. ;-)

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#75

Post by mfuzzey »

peakaboo wrote: post #43
quanticle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with those caveats, it's unclear whether the premise is satisfied. The Linux kernel is old (old enough to drink!) large (and getting larger!) and supported by many people. Has its quality declined? I don't think so. It supports more hardware than ever. Kernel panics don't happen nearly as often as they used to. New features (BPF), make kernel programming easier. It's difficult to say that the Linux kernel's qual…

People being up the Linux kernel on the same way they bring up Oprah as an example of being successful in America. 99.99999% of software in big corporations will not have even 5% of the quality of the Linux kernel. The reason the kernel has such a high quality is because of Linux being a dictator, training everybody in not always so nice ways to write code that doesn't break anything and that is maintainable. He care…

I don't think it's just Linus (though he certainly helps).

The kernel, unlike many other understaffed open source projects, has lots of developers working on it (the majority paid these days). At the same time, unlike software built by corporations, there are no non techinical PHBs to say "ship it now and clean it up later".

Linux has found the sweet spot of getting companies on board to provide paid developers (it's much easier to do good work when you can allocate large blocks of time to it because your're paid to do it) whilst at the same time preventing them having too much say over the technical directions and timelines. Typically a company employing kernel developers will have a say in what they do (drivers, core kernel, ...) but not on how they do it.

But it's not really a model that can work for all open source software.

For related reasons I think that companies that build lots of software but whose product isn't actually software (like Google that is really an advertising company) often produce better quality software than pure software companies (like Microsoft) because the technical staff are left more alone by management who prefer to concentrate on the "real business"

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#77

Post by zqna »

Here is the answer, around 70% of engineers just don't care, they are just happy to collect the paycheck and go on with their lives. The other 20% are pushed around by business needs, often lingering on burnout, eventually moving to other companies to try better luck and to reclaim peace no matter how short it would be, and often joining those other 70%, or at least stop taking things too seriously. Then there is the last 10% of quality nazis, who totally disregard business reality, and are the cause of stagnation in the companies, as their keep beautifying and overdesignig without delivering anything when it's needed.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#78

Post by vsareto »

streetcat1 wrote: post #4

Reasons: 1. The software creation process moved from designing software to "growing" software. With iteration time moving from months to weeks. So there is no conceptual integrity. 2. MVP turning to final products. Basically quick and dirty code become the foundation of the architecture, with no time to refactor. 3. Short tenure time. I think that avg tenure time for young developers is less than a year. Hence, the k…

I’ll try to add to this great list:

5. Planning - your abstractions sometimes don’t make sense in the face of new requirements. If the people planning the features of the product don’t do their own thinking, you’ll be guessing at what they’re going to do next. When that’s the case, it’s up to a dice roll to see if your abstractions will work nicely with the future requirements.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#79

Post by GhettoComputers »

Have you seen this talk? Jonathan Blow – Preventing the Collapse of Civilization https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317

tl;dr

Software efficiency is traded for time efficiency, you see this less with hardware constraints like embedded systems programming. As hardware capabilities increase, efficiency is less necessary. I see a reversal of this with rust (ripgrep is amazing), web assembly, while making programming easy leads to poorly optimized software like electron wrappers.

Re: Ask HN: Why is software quality always decreasing?

#80

Post by Gigachad »

trinovantes wrote: post #6
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

I don’t really agree with your premise. Software quality wasn’t pristine a few decades ago. It wasn’t hard to find messy codebases, apps that barely worked, and developers who simply fumbled their way through code until something compiled. If anything, it feels like common softest quality has trended upwards as software engineering learning materials have become more widely and freely available across the internet an…

It definitely feels like survivorship bias. We only remember the good software of the past while forgetting the hundreds of buggy mess created by companies that are probably defunct by now

I wonder if people are forgetting that not long ago, it was acceptable and normal that your word processor could have a bug in it which would crash the entire OS. Or how almost everything was insecure by default.
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