> 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 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Which might be true, but is totally irrelevant to the OP's comment.

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MrRadar 9 hours 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 6 hours 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 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Have you seen large consumer products’ codebases?… Companies like Google are tiniest exceptions when it comes to code gatekeeping and quality.

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jimbokun 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Funny how the biggest, most profitable software companies emphasize code quality.

	▲	4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
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	▲	tokioyoyo 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.