111–120 of 165 posts
Quality 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…
Resume-driven development; average tenure at big Tech is 1.5 years and it disincentivizes quality. Plus its not like lives depend on it; if insta UI breaks for a 30 seconds, who gives a f?
Can you direct me to the underlying data for this?
Quality 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…
Quality is expensive, but lack of quality is also expensive.
Low-quality software causes customer churn, increases implementation time for new features, causes more incidents, negatively affects your reputation, etc.
Moving fast is the right thing sometimes. But overall, quality is the way.
I spent a lot of time minimizing bugs and I choose deliberately to have less features and focus ond speed aan reliability.
But website visitors only see that a competing product has 2x the features (at great cost).
I have a customer with 10 million end users, in one year they have reported only 2 bugs, both bugs fixed within a day.
It's also hard to sell another 12 months of support this way, as it "just works". Bugs and imperfection can actually be a way for users to "bond" with your product.
Another downside is that the product does not have a weekly update cycle, as there is not much to fix.
People on github might think the project is dead. In reality, i spent a long time working on the product foundation, but that has no face value.
Quality 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 di…
Managers throw more people at the problem to improve productivity, only for the new people to need training. Okay, let's have the new people develop everything from scratch. Wow, that's fast... initially, but they throw code quality out of the window to reach feature parity asap, crippling productivity in the process again. Rinse and repeat.
Or, or... give people the time to improve things. Nobody wants to pay for quality in software until they realize how much it costs them to neglect quality. Unfortunately, some people never realize, cut their losses after a dozen rewrites, and launch the current half-assed iteration. No, it didn't work out for them.
Resume-driven development; average tenure at big Tech is 1.5 years and it disincentivizes quality. Plus its not like lives depend on it; if insta UI breaks for a 30 seconds, who gives a f?
- competitive or zero-sum performance evaluations (aka stack ranking)
- short evaluation windows (3 months or 6 months)
- two consecutive bad evaluations get you terminated
- KPI-driven evaluation: if you can't show numbers, you didn't do it
This basically means:
1. Someone investing time in creating long-term value will always lose out to someone focused on short-term value and may actually get fired by this system.
2. Certain types of projects will never be worth doing in this incentive model. Quality improvements that can't be quantified are not worth doing. If it costs 10x more effort to quantify the impact of some work than actually doing it, that work will never get done. Any project that spans longer than the evaluation window (either to execute or to show results) is not worth doing. Small arbitrary quality improvements in different parts of the system are not worth doing.
Great article, on a side note I wish we had a better word than ‘enshittification’. This ‘word’ has no etymological roots and cannot be taught to kids/teenagers or placed in the dictionary/thesaurus (most likely placed under the vulgar section if it has one) or cannot be said on tv or radio (some stations and channels have a policy that prohibits strong language being said over the airwaves) There has to be a better w…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification > Doctorow has used the term platform decay to describe the same concept.
I wondered about this a lot, while using certain software at work, and noticing that there are certain kinds of low quality that annoy me in different ways, and the one I focused on is the maddening kind of software crap where you know it could be good if they just looked at it and got a few brave people to fix it! Why don’t they? It’s because, first principle, the kind of quality dip that drives you nuts, is the one…
I don't think it is this. Good engineers could solve those problems if they had the time to. I think it's more about the people who make decisions not caring enough about the product quality. And also that most quality issues do not show up in metrics. So solving those issues just isn't a priority at all and if it becomes a low priority then low priority workers get assigned to it. Good people learn to follow the mon…
Resume-driven development; average tenure at big Tech is 1.5 years and it disincentivizes quality. Plus its not like lives depend on it; if insta UI breaks for a 30 seconds, who gives a f?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 di…
Yeah sure, really expensive until the accumulated tech debt prevents any productive work from being done. Correct a typo? Sorry boss, takes at least 1 year, shit hits the fan when you change labels like that (the truth). How much is your salary? Oh ok... let's not do that then. Managers throw more people at the problem to improve productivity, only for the new people to need training. Okay, let's have the new people…
When I am done with my car I just get a new one.
Yes there are software projects that need high quality but it is not 90% of cases.