Quality is hard because people stop talking to customers and become out of touch with them. Everyone thinks the next big thing will be what customers want, but customers will tell you what they want unfortunately nobody is listening.
Quality is a hard sell in big tech
81–90 of 165 posts
Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech
#82I feel Quality is a hard sell in Big Corp. because Philosophy is a hard sell in Big Corp. Without a shared philosophy about what constitutes goodness, there can be no shared understanding of Quality.
Like, prefacing a company memo this way [1] would probably be career-limiting.
All things emerge, change, and die. I think Quality is the experience of the process. The idea of Good Quality essentially boils down to performing the process with grace, and leaving the place better than we found it.
[1] https://www.evalapply.org/posts/how-to-not-die-by-a-thousand...
(edit: clarify opening sentence)
Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech
#83There's not much bigger tech than Boeing, yet I doubt they will be left operating if their plane quality gets too shoddy... Related reading : https://www.construction-physics.com/p/a-cycle-of-misery-the...
Still not shoddy enough?
According to their internal MBA metrics, probably not...
How much value did their stock price lose since a year ago? I had a look. It's 2 dollars higher than a year ago, a +/- 1% change, which is in the same order of change as its daily variation.
So, unfortunately for the passengers flying on those planes, it is probably going to have to get worse before something improves significantly..
Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech
#84It happens beyond stock price. I’ve had many conversations with people eager to adopt and integrate LLMs in some way with no second or third order reasoning behind it. If you force them to go through this reasoning process they find it doesn’t make sense right away.
Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech
#85Quality is expensive. Even a fairly minor improvement in basic Quality can double the cost of implementation. But, in my opinion, it’s absolutely required for complex systems, and complex problems often need complex answers, despite the wish for simplicity (which can sometimes happen, but less frequently than people might think). I had an online back-and-forth, the other day, with someone that didn’t seem to be able…
I would hook on quality is expensive take.
Lots of people write lengthy posts nagging about quality and usually these people work in qa or software dev where they get paid for it and mor quality is more work safety for them.
But no one wants really put their own money. Where fixing even trivial bug is 1h of work because someone has to write requirements, someone has to code it, someone has to check if it works and did not break something else.
1 hour on b2b market is $70 or $100 - no one is going to pay that to fix small issue.
I drive 10 year old car it has some issues and if I would go to car mechanic it would be $50 an hour - even if it would take 1 hour to fix all I am not willing to pay for that.
No one wants to pay for 100% quality.
Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech
#86Quality is a hard sell in almost every field in a world that values immediacy over the long term.
I mean, it’s the Vimes Boot Theory, everywhere. Everyone wants everything cheap, and now, and end up costing themselves more in the long term.
Vimes Boot theory was that poor people can't afford high quality stuff and thus pay more (constant replacement of low quality boots) and get less (wet feet).
Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech
#87Quality code is simple code, simple code does not provide job security nor does it pad CVs, its not only a top down conspiracy but a bottom up one as well
There's more to quality code is simple code. Some things or situations are inherently complex to handle and you may still want software for them (especially because they are complex). Simple code won't usually handle complex stuff, and you may still need quality. Now you should reach for simplicity. Which may itself be complex to define.
> Simple code won't usually handle complex stuff
I think you are confused about what simple code means.
Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech
#88Part of this is the hubris of Big Tech in shedding test teams and skilled testers in favor of devs who claim they can do it themselves. And then don’t. Because they don’t enjoy testing, and they aren’t rewarded for doing good testing.
I doubt devs actually say that they can do testing themselves. It sounds like something manager says.
The reason is what you wrote later: it's not fun and they don't do it properly (e.g. full test case instead of testing just changed part) and they know it.
Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech
#89The natural progression of a software product is from lower quality to higher quality. It's practically a given that a new product will be buggy, because many bugs are revealed only when the product reaches a large number of users. But the quality of the product should improve over time after a series of software updates that introduce fixes and refinements for the issues encounted by users. That's perfectly rational and logical, almost textbook software development. Somehow, though, the tech industry has turned this progression on its head and innovated their way into making existing software products worse in quality over time, less reliable and more buggy. It's a grossly unnatural situation. The questions are, how and why?
I think the "how?" question is easier to answer. I'll call the process "software rebranding". Or perhaps pathology is a better word than process. I've rarely seen a corporate rebranding — that is, a name or logo rebranding — that hasn't been a disaster and made the brand worse. Yet corporations continue to rebrand. Likewise, corporations seem to have an almost pathological compulsion to rebrand their software, to reinvent the wheel, fix what isn't broken, change for the sake of change. For whatever reason, they're unwilling to rest on their laurels, leave well enough alone. The situation has become so perverse that corporations now have to force software updates onto unwilling users who dread them. Various methods of hostile trickery are employed to perpetrate the deed, such as hiding the software update mechanisms or pushing annoying notifications that can't be suppressed.
The "why?" question is more difficult. Many commenters are suggesting that software quality doesn't "sell" in a non-competitive environment, e.g., a corporate duopoly. Quality doesn't move the stock price. But I would suggest that "shiny new features" don't move the stock price either in a non-competitive environment. Once a corporation has already captured its market and eliminated the competition, what good are new features? They're a needless expense when you could just milk the large, sticky user base. And as I already mentioned, the user base doesn't even necessarily want the changes. They're often dragged kicking and screaming into the software rebranding.
I'm not sure there is a rational explanation for the phenomenon. The tech industry is prone to trends, ideologies, you might even say religions. Agile, for instance. (I can't be the only person who looks at the image on the manifesto web page and isn't immediately reminded of the birth of Jesus and the "wise men".) Perhaps there's not a single explanation, though. A situation that's complex and widespread usually has compounding causal factors. I'd guess that in the tech industry it's a common feeling, or fear, that "if you're not innovating, you're dead". Even monopolies might be afraid of stopping the hamster wheel of constant change, regardless of whether their fears are founded.
Another suspicion I've had is that software rebranding is due to what I'll call Press Driven Development. If users aren't loving the rebranding, then who does love it? The press. Or rather, the press doesn't even need to love the branding; they could actually hate the rebranding, as long as they cover the rebranding. All press is good press, which is why bad rebrandings continue to occur, according to my theory. Free advertising for crap is better than no advertising for quality. The press has an endless hunger for new content, and corporate rebrandings, whether logo rebrandings or software rebrandings, feed this hunger. It's a mutually pathological relationship between the big tech companies and the tech press. (Can anyone explain why the vastly overhyped Google login page rebranding got so much press recently?)
Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech
#90Quality is expensive. Even a fairly minor improvement in basic Quality can double the cost of implementation. But, in my opinion, it’s absolutely required for complex systems, and complex problems often need complex answers, despite the wish for simplicity (which can sometimes happen, but less frequently than people might think). I had an online back-and-forth, the other day, with someone that didn’t seem to be able…
> It reminded me of that “Eat Less, Move More” SNL skit
Or another skit "Don't buy stuff you cannot afford."