| ▲ | mbesto 3 days ago |
| > obviously created by people the care deeply about the quality of the product they produce This obviously doesn't represent all of the billions of dollars spent on software like Salesforce, SAP, Realpage, Booking.com, etc. etc. (all notoriously buggy, slow, and complex software). You can't tell me with a straight face that all of the thousands of developers who develop these products/services care deeply about the quality of the product. They get real nice paychecks, benefits and put dinner on the table for their families. That's the market. > There is no substitute for high quality work. You're right because there really isn't a consistent definition of what "high quality" software work looks like. |
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| ▲ | MrRadar 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| > This obviously doesn't represent all of the billions of dollars spent on software like Salesforce, SAP, Realpage, Booking.com, etc. etc. (all notoriously buggy, slow, and complex software). You can't tell me with a straight face that all of the thousands of developers who develop these products/services care deeply about the quality of the product. They get real nice paychecks, benefits and put dinner on the table for their families. That's the market. Those first three are "enterprise" or B2B applications, where the person buying the software is almost never one of the people actually using the software. This disconnect means that the person making the buying decision cannot meaningfully judge the quality of any given piece of software they are evaluating beyond a surface level (where slick demos can paper over huge quality issues) since they do not know how it is actually used or what problems the actual users regularly encounter. |
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| ▲ | mbesto 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Which might be true, but is totally irrelevant to the OP's comment. | | |
| ▲ | MrRadar 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Users care about quality, even if the people buying the software do not. You can't just say "well the market doesn't care about quality" when the market incentives are broken for a paricular type of software. When the market incentives are aligned between users and purchasers (such as when they are the same person) quality tends to become very important for the market viability of software (see Windows in the consumer OS market, which is perceptibly losing share to MacOS and Linux following a sustained decline in quality over the last several years). | | |
| ▲ | mbesto 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > "well the market doesn't care about quality" You literally just told me the market doesn't care about quality. I don't get what point you're trying to make? > When the market incentives are aligned between users and purchasers (such as when they are the same person) quality tends to become very important for the market viability of software Right, but this magical market you're talking about doesn't exist. That's my point. |
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| ▲ | tokioyoyo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Have you seen large consumer products’ codebases?… Companies like Google are tiniest exceptions when it comes to code gatekeeping and quality. | | |
| ▲ | jimbokun 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Funny how the biggest, most profitable software companies emphasize code quality. | | |
| ▲ | tokioyoyo 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Have you seen Facebook's code quality? Have you seen any-big Chinese corpo code? There are a lot of very profitable businesses in the world with endless amount of tech debt. But tech debt is not necessarily a big deal in most scenarios. Obviously I'm not talking about mission critical software, but for general consumer/business software, it's fine. The hard part is understanding where you can cut the costs / add debt, and that comes from requirement gathering. | |
| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | deaux 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Riot Games around 2014(?) had the most profitable (non-mobile?) game in the world with an infamously horrific codebase, even by game standards. | |
| ▲ | alternatex 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | At Microsoft this totally depends on the org and team. I've seen the full spectrum of quality here. | |
| ▲ | pixl97 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm pretty sure that Google is an advertising company that just happens to write software. |
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| ▲ | Terr_ 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > You can't tell me with a straight face that all of the thousands of developers who develop these products/services care deeply about the quality of the product. What about caring and being depressed because quality comes from systems rather than (just) individuals? |
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| ▲ | tkiolp4 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| SAP, Salesforce, Booking.com… all awful products. We use them because monopolies. |
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| ▲ | cdrnsf 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I couldn't book travel at a previous company because my address included a `.`, which passed their validation. Awful, awful software. I wouldn't expect slop code to improve it. |
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| ▲ | jimbokun 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Now imagine how much they would make if their software was good. Google, Facebook, Apple clearly care deeply about the quality of their code. They have to because bugs, bad performance, outages, vulnerabilities have very direct and immediate costs for them. I know Amazon and Microsoft have their critics but I bet they are also better than we give them credit for. There are factors besides software quality that affect their success. But running bad software certainly isn’t going to help. |
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| ▲ | kode-targz 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | >Google, Facebook, Apple clearly care deeply about the quality of their code.
Yea, idk about that one.
They definitely did care in the past. They had to if they wanted to get users. But they've stopped caring a good while ago. Especially Microsoft. The costs that bad code would bring them is lower than the cost of developping good code, because they can mostly rely on monopolies and anti-competitive practices for user retention. Their users are more like hostages than anything else. | | |
| ▲ | tyingq 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Is Google much better? I don't see, for example, the care that used to go into the quality of organic search results. They seem fine with the output of the current hodge-podge of the original algorithm results plus massaging by many downstream ML pipelines that run one after the other without context of how each stop might affect the next. |
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| ▲ | christophilus 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Google, Facebook, Apple clearly care deeply about the quality of their code Not the impression I get these days. |
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| ▲ | theshrike79 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > You're right because there really isn't a consistent definition of what "high quality" software work looks like. And if you can deterministically define "high quality software" with linters, analysers etc - then an AI Agent can also create high quality software within those limits. |
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