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Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

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Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#31

Post by zero_shift »

ryandrake wrote: post #11
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #7

> You know what I haven’t seen? not once in 15 years? > A company going under. What a wild assertion: The OP hasn’t personally seen a company fail, and therefore software quality doesn’t matter? Bugs and slow delivery are fine? It’s trivially easy to find counterexamples of companies failing because their software products were inferior to newcomers who delivered good results, fast development, and more stable experi…

“My company didn’t go under” is pretty much the lowest bar you can shoot for. This blog post is saying “Staying healthy doesn’t matter because neither I nor anyone I know died so far.”

"and I've never met any dead people either"

Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#32

Post by balaga01 »

ryandrake wrote: post #11
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #7

> You know what I haven’t seen? not once in 15 years? > A company going under. What a wild assertion: The OP hasn’t personally seen a company fail, and therefore software quality doesn’t matter? Bugs and slow delivery are fine? It’s trivially easy to find counterexamples of companies failing because their software products were inferior to newcomers who delivered good results, fast development, and more stable experi…

“My company didn’t go under” is pretty much the lowest bar you can shoot for. This blog post is saying “Staying healthy doesn’t matter because neither I nor anyone I know died so far.”

Well, what is your goal?

Sure, healthy and happy chickens are nice, but if you are into industrial farming and your goal is to make money, you will make their life as miserable as necessary to extract profit. You don't care if they are barely alive as long as the health standards are met.

It's not about you being happy as an individual, it's about the company making money. If your lawyers and sales are good enough to build a captive market of miserable customers, your company can still make a ton of money and be very successful.

Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#33

Post by jonnycomputer »

bedobi wrote: post #18

The problem is that anyone with a semblance of professional pride will find it mentally quite difficult to knowingly ship bad software. Like, sure, even if we make best efforts to catch both obvious and less obvious bugs, all software we ship will still be full of bugs. But knowingly shipping software full of obvious bugs... it feels unprofessional. And makes you really feel the weight of all the inevitable bug repor…

yeah. and not just "not professional". It's basically giving the finger to a whole bunch of (generally) lower-paid support staff answering phone calls from irate customers.

Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#34

Post by switchbak »

This does seem like a bit of a fishing article, but I'll bite.

I've personally been involved in 2-3 software projects where the immediate ramifications related to software quality and delivery led to project failure.

The idea that bad (or no) architecture and terrible code won't have business impacts is just wrong. Perhaps he was lucky, perhaps we have collective survivorship bias, but I strongly disagree on the main premise here.

In one case, some bad decisions related to API design and customer extensibility led to a product that was simply impossible to change or evolve. That company did some custom work for a few clients on a shared framework, but after ~5-8 customers, the product was basically unchangeable. Some of the customers left, but we still couldn't change it, and the result was pretty predictable.

That you can limp along with terrible practices doesn't mean that better practices wouldn't improve the situation.

Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#36

Post by gaze »

hyperhello wrote: post #28

The core of this argument is really about the emotional health of the workers. An emotionally healthy person tends to want to maintain their environment. It doesn't do anything objective to have nice furniture and pretty paintings, but you like it in your house. You want to feel at peace, so you adjust little things...the kitchen would be nicer with the plates in a pile over here instead of just pulling them out of t…

Precisely. I get not going overboard and being a perfectionist. One has to ship. But also, you should have SOME pride in your work. You should want to not make total shit.

Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#37

Post by littlestymaar »

I got really surprised when I read the “original blog post” because it's less a blog post than is it some bland advertisement to “some online coaching that will make you a 10x engineer”. So when I see the OP qualifying as ”short and well-written, well worth the read“, I suspect all this is just a PR stun to attract attention to Cupać's paid online training program… (and this seems to be working pretty well since it's now on the top of the front page)

Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#38

Post by cybrox »

sanitycheck wrote: post #12

I've seen bad software and slow delivery lose companies important clients, causing job losses and severe financial problems. I've also seen companies go out of business because they tried to make perfect software and never actually delivered it to anyone. The right approach, I think, is to do the minimum necessary and do it very well. Easier said than done though.

I'd like to add: Do the minimum that is necessary. If it's well received, take the time to refine it. If it's not, scrap it.

Re: Responding to “Are bugs and slow delivery ok?”

#40

Post by jchw »

ryandrake wrote: post #11
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #7

> You know what I haven’t seen? not once in 15 years? > A company going under. What a wild assertion: The OP hasn’t personally seen a company fail, and therefore software quality doesn’t matter? Bugs and slow delivery are fine? It’s trivially easy to find counterexamples of companies failing because their software products were inferior to newcomers who delivered good results, fast development, and more stable experi…

“My company didn’t go under” is pretty much the lowest bar you can shoot for. This blog post is saying “Staying healthy doesn’t matter because neither I nor anyone I know died so far.”

This analogy is a bit tortured but it's honestly pretty good anecdata that something probably doesn't generally kill you if you've been around people doing it for 15 years and none of them have died yet. It can kill you, but that doesn't mean it generally does.

I'd love to come to the conclusion that it's wrong, but it's right. Most companies absolutely 100% can afford to ship bugs: the proof? They're doing it, they have been doing it, they will continue to do it. That doesn't mean that every company can, always, forever. A single really bad bug can tank a company. In the right conditions, simply being buggier to a superior competitor can tank a company. However, those are mostly just things developers fantasize about. The market is by and large not decided by how elegant and well-designed your software is, moreso in some verticals than others. In fact, this is basically true for almost anything that isn't explicitly developer oriented in the first place.

Just look at enterprise software. Jesus Christ.

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