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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

#141

Post by robbiejs »

jesselawson wrote: post #138
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.

It does make me proud, absolutely.

Do you have a product yourself?

Reach out to me at robbert@datagridxl.com.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#142

Post by bayindirh »

nothercastle wrote: post #140
bayindirh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I carefully selected the set. Half of them are closed source. A couple of them is pretty pricey.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#143

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

nothercastle wrote: post #140
bayindirh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> BBEdit, Sublime Text, OmniGraffle, Pixelmator... ForkLift

Those are all for-profit. I have paid for BBEdit for over 30 years.

Also, OmniGraffle is a standard tool, and I have been paying for that, since 1.0.

Same with ForkLift. I don't think that any of these are actually open-source.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#145

Post by Schattenbaer »

dolni wrote: post #113
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 is expensive. Even a fairly minor improvement in basic Quality can double the cost of implementation. 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 .

Part of this is a problem of quantification and immediacy.

Extra time spent doing the work well is easier to quantify as a cost than some issues down the line.

Low quality costs money, but only in time, and it's hard to pin down an exact cost. How much of an outage was caused by a quality shortcut? What percentage of our morale issues are caused by working with bad code? And how much, exactly, do those issues cost us? Was some specific quality compromise one of the straws that help break the camel's back?

Much harder questions, and the causes are often not clearly linked to their effects. Combine that with the human predilection for shortsightedness and our dislike of delayed gratification and you have a system that is stacked against quality.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#146

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

mnau wrote: post #88
satisfice wrote: post #10

Part 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.

I've been on two test teams and three dev teams... I think devs can do it, and I say as much when I'm in dev mode.

The manager just has to recognize that 80% of the time this will mean a 20% increase in dev time while the tests are written, and 20% of the time it'll mean a 400% increase while things are refactored to remain testable.

It sucks. The rest of the business doesn't get it. But the alternative is that you end up painted into the same corner: in need of that drastic refactor, except the people who it's blocking (QA) don't feel empowered to do it, meanwhile the devs just keep shipping features because they're not the ones that are blocked.

Better to take that occasional slowdown than to have nobody owning it at all.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#147

Post by __lbracket__ »

okdood64 wrote: post #112
__lbracket__ wrote: post #104

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?

> average tenure at big Tech is 1.5 years Can you direct me to the underlying data for this?

Don't know how reliable this is:

https://customers.ai/articles/employee-tenure-in-tech-compan...

But google around, this number is well known within the inustry.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#148

Post by __lbracket__ »

roncesvalles wrote: post #116
__lbracket__ wrote: post #104

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?

I think aspects of big tech employee evaluations are to blame: - 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…

>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.

I want there to be a domain/vertical where this does not hold.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#149

Post by edflsafoiewq »

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

Both take time, so within a given time limit, the more you allocate to one, the less to the other.

Re: Quality is a hard sell in big tech

#150

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #149
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

Both take time, so within a given time limit, the more you allocate to one, the less to the other.

Many auto shops have a sign up in their Service Department:

    • Good

    • Cheap

    • Fast

    Pick Two
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