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Quality is a hard sell in big tech

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Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#131

Post by nothercastle »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #129
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moving fast is the right thing sometimes. But overall, quality is the way. There must be some sweet spot between poor and perfect where (a) the quality is good enough to prevent greater than expected churn and (b) increasing quality anymore is so expensive that the additional profit isn't worth it. When NASA sends a rover to mars, the launch/space travel costs are so high that they can justify investing heavily in…

I always think of BMW, as an example of that level. Mercedes is better, but a fair bit more expensive. Bentley, Lamborghini, etc., are inasnely more expensive. Toyota, Honda, etc. are decent quality, though not at the same level, but are a lot cheaper. Of all the companies I mentioned, Toyota probably makes the most money (I have not bothered to check the financials, so I could be wrong). I guess it depends on corpor…

Toyota is the example everyone uses when talking quality. Honda is not far behind but the German brands are far lower quality instead opting for higher complexity. Obviously the Italian brands have never even heard of the word.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#132

Post by nothercastle »

bayindirh wrote: post #78
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #77

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 needs appreciation and an eye for it. It's abstract yet infinitely enhancing. I'll happily pay more for higher quality software and higher quality goods. At the end, I have my peace of mind, things work the way they should, in a predictable manner. This also means that quality is boring (and boring is good). As you said quality is expensive, and is hard. Because needs iteration, blood, sweat and tears. And ma…

High quality is orthogonal to high feature count. I think in most industries you need to balance it at least somewhat to keep up with the feature leader

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#133

Post by pooper »

bee_rider wrote: post #125
sgarland wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every developer in the team should be able to do all tasks I hate this. People have strengths, even if they’re all technically backend / frontend / whatever. Should you have more than one person who can perform a given task? Ideally yes, but let’s not pretend that Alice isn’t objectively better at SQL than James, but worse at async functions. Let people do what they’re best at, and enjoy the most.

I could see why management wouldn’t want to do that. By not getting Alice some practice on async functions, aren’t they making the team more fragile? Everything in moderation of course, but the team wouldn’t want to start leaning on each other’s specialization to the point that it all falls apart if somebody quits.

I would love it if we were all "cross function" but that comes at a cost of reduced velocity. First of all, a manager shouldn't be side channel dm his reports questioning the estimates/story points the team collectively decided at all but in this situation you have to live with reduced capacity forever if you want everyone to be a jack of all trades.

Management wants to have its cake and eat it too. I feel like if you object to an estimate, you must have to do the task yourself with the reduced estimate. This falls flat because I suspect my manager has ZERO programming/qa/development or even business analyst experience.

Just my personal opinion that if you think the estimate is wrong, you should take the task yourself and do it in less time or shut up.

You know how we talk about developers not able to do fizzbuzz with ten years' experience? I suspect he is whatever the equivalent of that is for managers.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#134

Post by ozim »

MyFedora wrote: post #123
ozim wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they drop project and start new one. Software is not endangered species to protect it by all means. 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.

I think cars are a poor example. Cheaping out on quality can cost companies 6 years of 12 developers' salaries, market share, reputation, customers and bankruptcy procedures instead of... 3 years of 9 developers' salaries. I've seen it firsthand: Major update to our only software product. Years of work. Everything is moving too slow. Managers hire more people. Performance tanks due to training the new folks. Our publ…

Here we are throwing arguments.

I don’t write about no quality. I write about reasonable level of quality.

I argue against “everything has to be perfect”.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#135

Post by pas »

ozim wrote: post #85
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #77

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…

Yes, but it's not that simple. There are millions of users of fancy/big tech who would without thinking pay even hundreds of dollars to crowdsource some quality-of-life change for things they use. (Think Windows, Android, GMail, WhatsApp, AWS self-service UI, Amazon.com, Epic, EMR systems, other large systems.)

But there's no market for this. And even then in many (likely most) cases the perceived user-facing quality is just irrelevant. There's no effective advocate for this.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#136

Post by bayindirh »

nothercastle wrote: post #132
bayindirh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality needs appreciation and an eye for it. It's abstract yet infinitely enhancing. I'll happily pay more for higher quality software and higher quality goods. At the end, I have my peace of mind, things work the way they should, in a predictable manner. This also means that quality is boring (and boring is good). As you said quality is expensive, and is hard. Because needs iteration, blood, sweat and tears. And ma…

High quality is orthogonal to high feature count. I think in most industries you need to balance it at least somewhat to keep up with the feature leader

BBEdit, Sublime Text, OmniGraffle, Pixelmator, Darktable, Forklift (file manager), KDE (as a whole), yt-dlp, curl, wget, freemind, mindnode (and I can add many more) are strong counter examples to this. They are high quality, packed with tons of features and are leaders or give leaders a decent run for their money.

The most important thing is all of them go slow. Without rushing. They don’t race. They release when they are done. And it shows.

Ah, also there’s CameraBag, which spent their last year optimizing first, adding more features second.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#137

Post by vrinsd »

Background: Have worked at a large number of big-tech hardware / software companies in senior roles.

My observation is that doing a 'good job' is not really measurable the way most companies think about it (it actually is if you talk with your actual end-customers or use your brain) but getting something done 'quickly' or 'in two quarters' makes an easy target people shoot for.

I also notice big companies tend to have goal setting practicies that basically encourage people to game the system by showing 'what they got done' ("implemented feature a") vs. 'how well the job was done'. I haven't seen any of these goal systems including a "look back" or feedback loop where the actual bugs filed against a feature are ever considered.

Quality engineering culture is really culture and has to come from the top down and very likely if people in the upper echelons of management are in their roles because of politics, quality is so far removed from what they care about it really ends up on the shoulders of a few individuals who "care".

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#138

Post by jesselawson »

robbiejs wrote: post #114

I have the same experience with my product DataGridXL ( https://datagridxl.com ). 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…

I got to the end of your post and realized I’d love to hear more about your thoughts around this. Also you must be proud of building something with so little bugs! Thats quite a feat.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#139

Post by badpun »

caskstrength wrote: post #106
toastercat wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism and Authoritarian State-Capitalism can both be bad. I agree with your general sentiment in that the general populace is OK with minor annoyances given a cheap price.

It seems you are confusing USSR with China. There was no "Authoritarian State-Capitalism" in USSR, no free-ish market with some level of competition, no entrepreneurship, no shareholders, no nothing and yet somehow car quality was significantly inferior to Ford, BMW, etc. and TVs were much worse than Sony ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Arguably, Soviets were prioritizing military production (up to 14% GDP going to military in the 80s), and everything else was an afterthought. They didn't need to give population quality cars, as they could just send them to Gulags if they bitched about the quality too much.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#140

Post by nothercastle »

bayindirh wrote: post #136
nothercastle wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High quality is orthogonal to high feature count. I think in most industries you need to balance it at least somewhat to keep up with the feature leader

BBEdit, Sublime Text, OmniGraffle, Pixelmator, Darktable, Forklift (file manager), KDE (as a whole), yt-dlp, curl, wget, freemind, mindnode (and I can add many more) are strong counter examples to this. They are high quality, packed with tons of features and are leaders or give leaders a decent run for their money. The most important thing is all of them go slow. Without rushing. They don’t race. They release when th…

The tools you listed don’t have to make a profit they are open source and can go slow.
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