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Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#31

Post by reactordev »

jofzar wrote: post #24

I feel like no one has said the elephant in the room. QA teams were fired/never hired in the first place (put onto the Devs/support/customer to report and test) Management want features and selling not Lovability and polish. We are just hitting an all time of make make make.

This is the correct take. QA was under attack the entire Agile(TM) cycle we just exited. Now with agentic coding, the only thing keeping it on the rails is TDD. Either you write the tests or you write the spec.

You are also responsible for the output. Welcome to the New Age. Management is just as clueless as they have ever been (some more than others) and yet most of them lack the intelligence to know exactly how it all works. Hell, there’s still plenty of engineers that don’t know how it all works.

Eventually, when you come to understanding or you reach that “enlightenment” stage, no corporate BS will penetrate you and you’ll forever see past their shenanigans. At this stage though you’ll be a grey beard and be unemployable. So they cut out anyone who knows the BS to bring in folks who believe the BS so they can continue shipping BS.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#33

Post by dilawar »

I use cheap android devices. My current one is a cheap Motorola and before samsung and Chinese vendors. I've never seen bugs like I have encountere since the last update (2 months ago).

Unless I reboot the device everyday, I can't make a call. The button is pressed but never proceeds to ring, doesn't even show an error message. The play service complains that I am logged out but shows my account info in the login panel!! Rebooting is the only way, android is like windows currently.

I am just scared to update anything these days. And not just android apps, Even rsync gave me a minor scare (fortunate my backup jobs are on debian stable).

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#34

Post by rf15 »

david927 wrote: post #21

I thought about writing a comedy, set in the far future, where everything looks beautiful but nothing works right and it's just accepted (almost unnoticed) as a running gag throughout the film. Now I wonder how prescient that would be.

The Film Brazil, but the environment is designed by Apple.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#35

Post by exabrial »

Yes. My observation is that FAANG culture persisting the myth that testing is slow or writing clean/consistent code is slow (conveniently playing to the dev's ego, but I digress). As a result, a lot of bugs get shipped, inevitably triggering a rework cycle. But what does not get measured, does not get reported. As a result devs look busier than ever, great for their reviews, while quality dives.

A turnaround in the industry would be actually capturing the rework cycle into costs.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#36

Post by adverbly »

Someone should come up with an index to track this objectively.

Otherwise, its all anecdotes and speculation.

Some random ideas:

1. Measure trends in HTTP status codes over time

2. Measure github issues created over time

3. Measure complaints on forums over time

4. Google trends

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#37

Post by bigfishrunning »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #12

Sure, but I would have agreed with you 10 years ago too. We were in the throes of making really fat assets that weak computers couldn't load quickly.

"weak computers" is the funniest part. The computer I'm typing this on *right now* is orders of magnitude faster then the Athlon XP processor that i was using in 2003, but it doesn't feel much faster. I think that hardware advancement is just slower then software bloat...

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#38

Post by culopatin »

Yes, I initially jumped from Android to iPhone back in 2019 or so because I felt like the experience was much more stable and it just worked, smooth, no issues, kinda boring but in a good adult way. Now every interaction makes me want to throw the phone out the window. If it’s not just blank, the keyboard doesn’t come up, the navbar in Safari sometimes is there, sometimes it’s a blank rectangle, etc. “ask your developer to update the apps to run well in iOS 26” is such a garbage response. We didn’t need to break everything just to have some glass simulations that make everything slower and add no value.

Google Home: holy shit dude. It was a mostly working thing. Absolutely unusable with Gemini. Will get the transcript right 15% of the time. Can’t even ask for the weather.

Roku: Netflix playing in the background but I’m still in the main menu.

I can go on

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?

#39

Post by adverbly »

cutterl6 wrote: post #26
jofzar wrote: post #24

I feel like no one has said the elephant in the room. QA teams were fired/never hired in the first place (put onto the Devs/support/customer to report and test) Management want features and selling not Lovability and polish. We are just hitting an all time of make make make.

There's a much larger elephant in the room

Ooh ohh Ohh I think I know what it is!
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