The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe

The best I can figure is that too many people’s salaries depend on the matrix multiplier made of sand somehow manifesting a soul any day now.

It's almost worse than Twitter.

The simple statement is that "Quality isn't what sells" and I think there's some truth to that, but I also think quality can sell and theoretically if all other factors are equal higher quality will sell better.

What I've had a tough time pinning down precisely is I think there's almost an ecosystem balancing act occurring between quality, effort expended, and skill required. Particularly in American culture I think one of our economic 'super powers' is that we sort of have an innate sense for how much something can be half-assed while still being mostly effective. We're great at finding the solution that gets 80% of the job done for 20% of the effort while requiring less skill.

I think you can see that through all sorts of disciplines, and the result is a world of kind of mid quality things that is actually quite efficient and resilient.

Where that goes wrong is when the complexity and problems start to compound in a way that makes any effort substantially more wasteful. It reminds me of how my game jam experiences go: for the first 60% I'm writing code at a tremendous velocity because I'm just putting down whatever works but by the end the spaghetti nightmare of the code reduces my velocity dramatically. Even when that occurs though the ecosystem nature of complexity means that your competitors are likely mired in similar complexity, and the effort to get out may be large enough and require enough talent that you don't you can change.

To improve quality I think it's not enough to just say "People should care about quality more" I think you have to fundamentally target aspects of the ecosystem, like changing the course of a river by moving a few rocks. A good example I think has adjusted the behavior of the ecosystem is Rust: it makes certain things much easier than before and slowly the complex bug-mired world of software is improving just a little bit because of it.

If we look at most trades historically:

- Electricians in the 1920s? Infinite ways to do things. DC vs AC wars. Knob-and-tube vs conduit vs armored cable. Every electrician had their own "creative" approach to grounding. Regional variations, personal styles, competing philosophies. Almost all of those other ways are gone now. Early attempts to impose codes on electricians and electrical devices were disasters.

- Plumbers in the 1920s? Lead vs iron vs clay pipes. Every plumber had their own joint compound recipe. Creative interpretations of venting. Artistic trap designs. Now? Why does even installing a basic pipe require a license? We found out after enough cholera outbreaks, methane explosions, and backed-up city sewer systems.

- Doctors in the 1920s? Bloodletting, mercury treatments, lobotomies, and their own "creative" surgical techniques. They violently resisted the American Medical Association, licensing requirements, and standardized practices. The guy who suggested handwashing was literally driven insane by his colleagues.

We're early, not special. And just like society eventually had enough of amateur electricians, plumbers, and doctors in the 1920s, they'll have enough of us too. Give it 40 years, and they'll look at our data breaches and system designs the same way we look at exposed electrical wiring, obviously insane no matter the amount of warnings.