Ask HN: Why is software quality an afterthought for many people/companies?

A thought: The slightest design flaw or manufacturing flaw in a microprocessor or memory chip can reduce its value to zero. Generally, flaws in software are easier to correct and don't have the same catastrophic effect on value.

Because of the fact that software is seen as a cost center rather than as a means of production. If you were to factor quality in right at the start most projects would never be approved and so we try to 'fix' the problem at two minutes to twelve.

This is also a large factor in why software projects tend to overrun both in terms of time and budget (the other large factor is bad project management).

To most businesses, the core objective is creating a profitable business, and most other objectives, including engineering, marketing, support, and yes, in many companies even things like customer and employee satisfaction, are secondary to that, and only really prioritized to the extent that improving those areas also improves the bottom line (I would in fact argue that this is true of almost all companies, and that the difference in whether they prioritize customer and employee satisfaction or not, is mostly a matter of whether they look at the impact on the bottom line in a short-sighted manner, or in a more long-term way).

So in regards to your question, it would seem that the market reality is that a lot of the time, it is better for a company to have a quickly-cobbled-together piece of software that mostly does what the customers want (and maybe get to the market first) even if it is low-quality, than it is to have a piece of high-quality software that does less, or is finished later, but is maintainable, and potentially scalable in the future (which you'll never get to enjoy because the worse-is-better people already conquered the market).

Software development is, apart from a few rare outposts like GOV.UK, conducted in the private sector for a profit.

That means that the number one consideration for the software is profitability. For internal-only software, this means that cost is the prime consideration.

In support of that, often software startups are trying to capture a winner-takes-all market, so time-to-market is critical.

Thirdly, consumer protection law is weak in the US, and product liability is almost nonexistant for software everywhere. The cost of failure is very low even if you leak all your customers' data or your product ceases to work after 18 months because you've "pivoted".

Fourthly, a lot of software is ""free"" or ad-funded. This further weakens the cost of failure.

There are techniques for delivering extremely high quality software. Few sectors of the industry care about them because it's not required and is unprofitable, but the aerospace people can usually get it right and the security people can usually get it right (when dealing with security products, not general purpose junk like Flash).

The automotive industry is kind of on a boundary. The Toyota "unintended acceleration" bug revealed some tremendously poor quality software. This is one of the main worries about self-driving cars: how minimal is the quality assurance going to be?

In Peopleware, Tom DeMarco thinks it's because a business's customers will tolerate lower quality software, so there are diminishing marginal returns to revenue as investment in software quality continues. He predicts that while this management style works wonderfully for the bottom line in the short run, it causes long-term ailments such as team dissatisfaction, overly complex architectures, and other issues that may be more expensive overall.

Quality and security become increasingly important as we depend even more on software systems for essential functions such as cars, power grid management, agriculture, etc. Unfortunately, this situation is all too similar to how many opt for the emergency room over preventative care.

We should also consider that many businesses wouldn't exist if not for lax quality requirements for software products. How many product V1s are chock full of bugs and exploits, and to what extent is that okay? What about open source? As usual, it's pretty complicated.