51–60 of 165 posts
Great article, on a side note I wish we had a better word than ‘enshittification’. This ‘word’ has no etymological roots and cannot be taught to kids/teenagers or placed in the dictionary/thesaurus (most likely placed under the vulgar section if it has one) or cannot be said on tv or radio (some stations and channels have a policy that prohibits strong language being said over the airwaves) There has to be a better w…
Disclaimer: working for Google, a Big Tech company. While enshittification is certainly real, stock value or company size can't explain it all. Do startups produce shining examples of high-quality code? Not from what I've heard. It's whatever hack gets it working. Google had put a lot of work into cleaning up the messes of the past, and from what I hear from Xooglers has one of the nicest code bases around. Quality c…
> Do startups produce shining examples of high-quality code? Presumably this is about the quality of the end software, not the code that feeds it. some classes of startups are certainly known for attempting to improve quality apparent to the end-user over market leaders. Some even succeed. For the most part this isn't hard compared to "big tech"—just strip out the enterprise-oriented crap and ads. The hard part of ma…
Disclaimer: working for Google, a Big Tech company. While enshittification is certainly real, stock value or company size can't explain it all. Do startups produce shining examples of high-quality code? Not from what I've heard. It's whatever hack gets it working. Google had put a lot of work into cleaning up the messes of the past, and from what I hear from Xooglers has one of the nicest code bases around. Quality c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do startups produce shining examples of high-quality code? Presumably this is about the quality of the end software, not the code that feeds it. some classes of startups are certainly known for attempting to improve quality apparent to the end-user over market leaders. Some even succeed. For the most part this isn't hard compared to "big tech"—just strip out the enterprise-oriented crap and ads. The hard part of ma…
The list in the article lists more code quality issues than user visible issues. And frankly, bugs and UI flakiness are everywhere.
Otherwise the scope will grow exponentially no matter how big is your company you won’t be able to fix all the defects.
PS. Big fan of this person’s recent blog posts. He’s been on a roll!
I wondered about this a lot, while using certain software at work, and noticing that there are certain kinds of low quality that annoy me in different ways, and the one I focused on is the maddening kind of software crap where you know it could be good if they just looked at it and got a few brave people to fix it! Why don’t they? It’s because, first principle, the kind of quality dip that drives you nuts, is the one…
Disclaimer: working for Google, a Big Tech company. While enshittification is certainly real, stock value or company size can't explain it all. Do startups produce shining examples of high-quality code? Not from what I've heard. It's whatever hack gets it working. Google had put a lot of work into cleaning up the messes of the past, and from what I hear from Xooglers has one of the nicest code bases around. Quality c…
Start-ups don't have 100000+ employees to get everything right. Google does. The caliber of comments has deteriorated significantly on this site in the last decade. It's almost as if a new generation of money chasers invaded and displaced the actual hackers.
GPs point, I think, is where are these supposed small/medium tech companies with such dedication and success in maintaining quality? This seems like a pretty universal problem across all tech, not anything specific to "big" tech. I'm not sure where you're finding these supposed "high quality" startup products; their offerings are almost universally even worse IME.
Moreover, the personal jab at the end is quite confusing. You might disagree with GPs point, but the "caliber" of their comment seems quite decent, and certainly far higher than your own.