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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?

#111

Post by [deleted] »

AlanAzarkin wrote: post #110
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.

QA is more likely needed for humans, but in the LLM era, when agents write consistent code, there is no need for it anymore in my opinion. A bad example, but still: I recently developed a TG bot without a single test, and yet, it works.

[deleted]

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

#112

Post by M95D »

hnfong wrote: post #71
isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah in Windows XP time if my computer didn't crash several times a week, it was odd.

Ironically Windows XP was the first "consumer" (i.e. not "workstation") Windows version to not crash several times a day . In the 98/ME era, it was pretty common to reboot every couple hours or the system would randomly do that for you.

Ironically, when I overclocked my system beyond it's limits, WinXP would crash on boot, but Win98 would boot just fine and (sometimes) crash later, during the game.

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

#113

Post by rkuykendall-com »

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.

This was a theme in early Futurama (before it just became another Simpsons). A great example from the pilot is the Star Trek doors that keep closing on Fry.

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

#114

Post by iamflimflam1 »

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 has been happening for a long time - more than 10 years ago there was a movement away from having QA.

Partly it was about continuous delivery - you can’t push out to production instantly if you have people doing QA.

Partly it was - developers should be responsible for the quality of what they produce.

And it was also trendy to say - I’ve just got rid of our QA team - we don’t need them.

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

#115

Post by girishso »

hnfong wrote: post #71
isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah in Windows XP time if my computer didn't crash several times a week, it was odd.

Ironically Windows XP was the first "consumer" (i.e. not "workstation") Windows version to not crash several times a day . In the 98/ME era, it was pretty common to reboot every couple hours or the system would randomly do that for you.

Didn't they dump old Windows 95 kernel in XP and switched to Windows NT kernel in XP?

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

#116

Post by tacostakohashi »

reactordev wrote: post #31
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…

I don't hold a lot of hope for TDD if the tests are AI-generated from the AI-generated code... which I see a lot.

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

#117

Post by JD1967 »

I started my professional career in software development in the mid 80's and had home computers like Atari before then. While software was much more simple back then, I think people just whine more now. When we encountered bugs, we worked around them and adapted. We didn't have the Internet to cry to. We were happy that we even had computers and they mostly worked.

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

#118

Post by jeffreyrogers »

JD1967 wrote: post #117

I started my professional career in software development in the mid 80's and had home computers like Atari before then. While software was much more simple back then, I think people just whine more now. When we encountered bugs, we worked around them and adapted. We didn't have the Internet to cry to. We were happy that we even had computers and they mostly worked.

Yeah, I used to get data corrupting crashes routinely in all sorts of software I use. Now although I occasionally have problems with data not being saved or entered twice, etc. it's been a long time since I lost more than a few minutes of work from a bug like that.

People forget how buggy software used to be or grew up post phone/tablet/webapp where bugs are fixed much faster.

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