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

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51–60 of 128 posts

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

#51
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…

I agree with most of what you said, but this...

> At this stage though you’ll be a grey beard and be unemployable.

isn't as true as people think. I'm a graybeard and remain very much in demand, as do the majority of the graybeards I know.

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

#52
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.

Another elephant in the room is the widespread impact of neverending COVID re-infections of people who don't wear N95s in public (most people). Vaccines don't prevent transmission, which leaves everyone open to acquiring long COVID. Long COVID is very likely underdiagnosed due to widespread ignorance, and not helping matters is that 40% of infections are asymptomatic during the acute phase.

Long COVID can include issues with memory and risk taking.

https://www.camh.ca/en/camh-news-and-stories/rsch-new-study-...

I don't think software is the only field impacted by this, but it's undoubtedly one of them considering how few people take proper precautions via regular N95 usage.

COVID in general is also heavily politicized (as seen in the silent downvotes), and the back-to-normal agenda was forced by capital interests, including tactics like mass disinformation campaigns.

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

#53
This might sound like a rant, but it's more an attempt to outline the breadth of the problem by way of many examples. Software quality sucks right now, enough so that I plan my life around it. Payment processing is regularly broken? I'll maintain a couple cards from different providers. Login systems are always broken? If you require a login then I'm going to weigh the quality of your service against not just its physical dollar cost but also the amount of my time you're about to waste if I sign up. Etc.

Enterprise broke something and has been unable to text or email me receipts and reservation information for months. No trouble; I'll look up my information manually on their site when I want to modify a reservation. Great, I've found that information, surely I can modify it? Nope; that's broken too, and it asks me to call and doesn't provide the number I should call. So...I'll look up their customer support number, surely that isn't broken? Nope, somebody deployed a version of the site where I physically see the handlebars and variable name which should have referenced the phone number rather than its actual value, and they seemingly didn't notice or weren't able to roll back the change for at least a day.

And that's not to pick on them (especially because they're otherwise a good company IME), but to highlight a series of technical fuckups which never would have flown in past years, and they're not alone. My HSA just made it impossible to log in without buying a new phone, every single time I've tried to set up automatic payments for Visa they've had a different bug on their website preventing that, WalMart supposedly allows buying things for people in other states (I was buying my sister tires), but some broken AI will reverse the transaction hours later. eBay and Visa are even better on that front; their customer support seemingly aren't able to override the broken fraud-detection AI, so there are some Visa purchases I can't make, and every time I log in to eBay my account credentials are forcibly reset a day later.

Beyond the straight, obvious incompetence manifest in 3+ major bugs in nearly every website or service I interact with, there are also stranger bugs (no "strangest" bugs in recent memory). One of my coworkers has a reliable network blip every 20s (my memory is fuzzy, it might have been 10s or 15s when I timed it, but it's incredibly consistent), only hitting their outbound traffic, and it's at or upstream of the modem. One site I visit has some sort of broken filtering from my mobile carrier, but only for their login page, so I need to use a VPN to log in, but then the rest of the site has VPN detection, so I need to leave the VPN to access the rest. A little while ago, I stopped being able to accept calls while my wireless hotspot is active. Slack automatically moved precisely one of my DMs from the section I had assigned to it to a different section. Discord and Target both had an automatic retry on a failed telemetry implementation without backoff which caused you to immediately violate their rate limit by just visiting the site.

And so on. Major companies are writing broken software, missing the bugs in review, missing them in testing, don't have monitoring or alerting on core metrics to be able to roll back when their deploys suck (or just can't roll back), usually have no way to contact them to inform them of the mistake, and sometimes choose not to fix bugs as big as "many of our customers can't pay us" in days, sometimes ever.

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

#54
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

At this point there's a room in the elephant.

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

#55
post #34

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.

Yeah, something like that but more utopian and closer to Jacques Tati's Playtime.

And I think that's what would make it funny: the affordance of the efficiency in design creating that expectation of a correctness in delivery which is slightly subverted.

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

#56
It's very simple; If you work 10x faster, you need to release 1/10th the bugs as before for the user's experience to have the same level of bugginess. And we're not incentivized for this; we're still exploring how to ship 10x faster and not exploring how to meet our users' needs 10x better (often conflating the two!)

And I mean, go tell your leadership "Those projects that used to take us a full quarter? Now we can do them in 6 weeks." You don't get the rest of the quarter to stabilize your codebase. Now you jam 2 releases into the quarter.

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

#57
Related last week:

Notes on Software Quality

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48821441

Related from last October:

Ask HN: Why is software quality collapsing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45474346

The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45528347

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

#58
post #53

This might sound like a rant, but it's more an attempt to outline the breadth of the problem by way of many examples. Software quality sucks right now, enough so that I plan my life around it. Payment processing is regularly broken? I'll maintain a couple cards from different providers. Login systems are always broken? If you require a login then I'm going to weigh the quality of your service against not just its phy…

Yeah man, I think this exactly captures what I've been feeling - every time I need to get something done, I consistently hit some experience breaking bug. And you're totally right, I've actually just come to expect it and work around it...

Do you think in the future apps that are stable and "just work" will be a moat? Feels like the direction we're trending in.

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

#59
Software quality, i.e lack of bugs, from the average user's perspective, is a hygiene factor. High quality does not get rewarded, and the instant it crosses below the threshold of "good enough", users will punish you.

The eternal question for management seems to be "what can we get away with?".

A dev with quality problems in their output? Can em'. A dev with exceptional quality in their output? Can em'. A dev with just the right corners cut? Keep 'em, but no raise.

Is this regime right or fair? I don't think so, but it is the incentives that drive all of this.

I believe the only solution to this, at least in the for-profit software world, is to try to convince everyone to pay for quality. If the money is there, then maybe management will reward devs who care about quality user experiences.

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

#60
uThermal has been documenting in shorts the myriad game breaking bugs introduced into StarCraft 2 in recent patches. The game was super stable for 15 years and now you can load 8 sieged tanks into a medivac at a time. Anyway I am seeing the same thing as you in many different arenas
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