A software conference that advocates for quality • Hacker News Board

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#81

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 10:50 AM UTC

jcgrillo wrote: post #76

rachofsunshine wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't happen because building the best software is not the goal of a software engineering job. If you want to do that on your own time, that's fine - but the purpose of a job is economic. Of course you should write software of some reasonable quality, but optimizations have diminishing economic returns. Eventually, the returns are lower than the cost (in time, money, etc) of further optimizing, and this break-ev…

While I agree with everything you've said, I think you might be making an assumption that quality costs time. In my experience this isn't the case, unless you're starting from a low quality codebase or working with low quality people. A high quality team can produce high quality software in less time than it takes a low quality team to produce low quality software meeting the same functional requirements. The whole b…

[deleted]

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#82

Post by MoreQARespect » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 10:52 AM UTC

thecupisblue wrote: post #62

supportengineer wrote: post #42

I’ve seen one company in my 30 year career with effective quality control. The QE engineers and the development engineers were in entirely separate branches of the org chart. They had different incentive structures. The interface documentation was the source of truth. The release cadence was slow. QE had absolute authority to stop a release. QE wrote more code than development engineers did with their tests and test…

I've worked at one of those companies where software quality was paramount. They did TDD for a long time, they wrote Clean Code™, they organised meetups, sponsored and went to conferences, they paid 8th Light consultants to come teach (this was actually worth it!) and sent people to Agile workshops and certificates. At first, I was like "wow, I am in heaven". About a year later, I noticed so much repetition and waste…

It sounds like they were cargo culting ThoughtWorks.

ThoughtWorks and companies like them do work but theyre heavily reliant upon heavy duty sales. Delivery at high quality is necessary but not sufficient.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#83

Post by pydry » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 11:02 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #54

kilpikaarna wrote: post #45

This thing feels pretty weird to me. I'm guessing it's an attempt at organizing some sort of european Handmade event, and trying to keep it small. But between the sparse website, invite-only and anonymous organizers, it just feels like it's emphasizing the reactionary vibes around the Handmade/casey/jblow sphere. Like they don't want a bunch of blue-haired antifa web developers to show up and ruin everything. Glad to…

Like they don't want a bunch of blue-haired antifa web developers to show up and ruin everything. There's a reason web developers, and the ecosystem/community around them, are the butt of many jokes. I don't think it's at all surprising that the injection of identity politics into the software industry has had a negative effect on quality.

Ive noticed that some of these types tend to be well meaning young people (often girls) who are super excited to have scored a job doing developer outreach for $BIGTECH.

It's a clever political tactic coz a 50 year old white male middle manager at Microsoft trying to become a board member on an open source foundation would face a lot more hostility than a 20-something girl who pushes all of the diversity buttons.

It mirrors the rather successful marketing strategies for a string of movies including Ghostbusters movie and Barbie, among others. i.e. "There's a certain kind of person who doesnt like our latest corporate offering...". Who wants to be that person?

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#84

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 11:11 AM UTC

Sounds good, but unless it advocates for HR practices that retain talent, and corporate practices that incentivize Quality, it probably won't result in any changes.

Personal Quality Coding practices have been around for as long as software has been a thing. Way back when, Watts Humphrey, Steve McConnell, and Steve Maguire wrote books on how to maximize personal Quality. Many of their techniques still hold true, today.

But as long as there are bad people managers and short-sighted execs, you'll have shit quality; regardless of who does the work.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#85

Post by popularonion » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 11:16 AM UTC

supportengineer wrote: post #42

I’ve seen one company in my 30 year career with effective quality control. The QE engineers and the development engineers were in entirely separate branches of the org chart. They had different incentive structures. The interface documentation was the source of truth. The release cadence was slow. QE had absolute authority to stop a release. QE wrote more code than development engineers did with their tests and test…

Every company I’ve seen that maintains a separate QA org chart, inevitably offshores the entire QA org to India or China, with predictable results.

In 2025 I think the only thing that makes sense is having SDETs embedded in development teams.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#86

Post by wolvesechoes » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 11:21 AM UTC

thecupisblue wrote: post #62

supportengineer wrote: post #42

I’ve seen one company in my 30 year career with effective quality control. The QE engineers and the development engineers were in entirely separate branches of the org chart. They had different incentive structures. The interface documentation was the source of truth. The release cadence was slow. QE had absolute authority to stop a release. QE wrote more code than development engineers did with their tests and test…

I've worked at one of those companies where software quality was paramount. They did TDD for a long time, they wrote Clean Code™, they organised meetups, sponsored and went to conferences, they paid 8th Light consultants to come teach (this was actually worth it!) and sent people to Agile workshops and certificates. At first, I was like "wow, I am in heaven". About a year later, I noticed so much repetition and waste…

From your description it looks like that company wasn't into quality but into chasing every fad of software industry.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#87

Post by wiseowise » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 11:22 AM UTC

astrobe_ wrote: post #78

rachofsunshine wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't happen because building the best software is not the goal of a software engineering job. If you want to do that on your own time, that's fine - but the purpose of a job is economic. Of course you should write software of some reasonable quality, but optimizations have diminishing economic returns. Eventually, the returns are lower than the cost (in time, money, etc) of further optimizing, and this break-ev…

Companies can sacrifice every thing for "time to market" - optimization, maintainability, security and safety even - but underestimate the costs of doing that. It is actually more a marketing choice than an economic choice. One can be skeptical about the implied statement and leadership/management knows what it is doing beyond delivering at the (arbitrarily) set time. One definition of Quality is to satisfy a need en…

> but underestimate the costs of doing that

Do they? I’ve been fighting against the tide for years until I understood that all of quality this and quality that doesn’t matter. Sure, it sucks to be on the receiving end of buggy software, but this where you vote with your money. At work? Finish the task with least amount of resources and move on.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#88

Post by wiseowise » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 11:24 AM UTC

jcgrillo wrote: post #76

rachofsunshine wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't happen because building the best software is not the goal of a software engineering job. If you want to do that on your own time, that's fine - but the purpose of a job is economic. Of course you should write software of some reasonable quality, but optimizations have diminishing economic returns. Eventually, the returns are lower than the cost (in time, money, etc) of further optimizing, and this break-ev…

While I agree with everything you've said, I think you might be making an assumption that quality costs time. In my experience this isn't the case, unless you're starting from a low quality codebase or working with low quality people. A high quality team can produce high quality software in less time than it takes a low quality team to produce low quality software meeting the same functional requirements. The whole b…

> A high quality team can produce high quality software in less time than it takes a low quality team to produce low quality software meeting the same functional requirements.

Key word is ‘can’. And it takes far more time and money to assemble “quality” team.

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#89

Post by elcapitan » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 11:26 AM UTC

kilpikaarna wrote: post #45

This thing feels pretty weird to me. I'm guessing it's an attempt at organizing some sort of european Handmade event, and trying to keep it small. But between the sparse website, invite-only and anonymous organizers, it just feels like it's emphasizing the reactionary vibes around the Handmade/casey/jblow sphere. Like they don't want a bunch of blue-haired antifa web developers to show up and ruin everything. Glad to…

> Like they don't want a bunch of blue-haired antifa web developers to show up and ruin everything

This reads like "Oh some people are meeting, so this must actually be about ME".

Re: A software conference that advocates for quality

#90

Post by vouwfietsman » Sat, Jul 12, 2025, 11:29 AM UTC

mustache_kimono wrote: post #34

swesour wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is not so much concerned that their software might be buggy as that it might be lame This is not at _all_ my interpretation of Casey and JBlow's views. How did you arrive at this conclusion? > They're more concerned about user experience and efficiency than they are about correctness. They're definitely very concerned about efficiency, but user experience? Are you referring to DevX? They definitely don't priz…

> This is not at _all_ my interpretation of Casey and JBlow's views. IMHO this group's canonical lament was expressed by Mike Acton in his "Data-Oriented Design and C++" talk, where he asks: "...Then why does it take Word 2 seconds to start up?!"[0]. See also Muratori's bug reports which seem similar[1]. I think it is important to note, as the parent comment alludes, that these performance problems are real problems,…

This is a bit of a simplification of the ideas of Blow, Muratori et al, a much better source for the ideas can be found in "Preventing the collapse of civilization" [0].

The argument made there is that "software quality" in the uncle bob sense, or in your domain version, is not necessarily wrong but at the very least subjective, and should not be used to guide software development.

Instead, we can state that the software we build today does the same job it did decades ago while requiring much vaster resources, which is objectively problematic. This is a factual statement about the current state of software engineering.

The theory that follows from this is that there is a decadence in how we approach software engineering, a laziness or carelessness. This is absolutely judgemental, but its also clearly defended and not based on gut feel but rather on these observations around team sizes/hardware usage vs actual product features.

Their background in videogames makes them an obvious advocate for the opposite, as the gaming industry has always taken performance very seriously as it is core to the user experience and marketability of games.

In short, it is not about "oh it takes 2 seconds to startup word ergo most programmers suck and should pray to stand in the shadow of john carmack", it is about a perceived explosion in complexity both in terms of number of developers & in terms of allocated hardware, without an accompanying explosion in actual end user software complexity.

The more I think about this, the more I have come to agree with this sentiment. Even though the bravado around the arguments can sometimes feel judgemental, at its core we all understand that nobody needs 600mb of npm packages to build a webapp.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko