The sad reality is that the vast majority of customers (whoever you are writing software for: clients, management, or end users) simply don't care as much about quality. If you give them the "time, cost, and quality" pick-two choice, 99.9% of customers are going to ask for fast+cheap. It's not the world I wish we were living in.

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torginus 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This isn't true. I don't think you or me would want a car/TV/smartphone that's cheap and flashy but breaks every two weeks. Sometimes people are strapped for cash that's why they cheap out on stuff, or really are enthusiastic about it, so they tolerate it breaking all the time, but for everything else, reliability is king.

	▲	Nextgrid 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Nobody _wants_ it, but in practice if all cars/TVs/smartphones break every two weeks, what choice do people have? In tech, the era of competing based on quality is long gone. The winning strategy is to get a monopoly/oligopoly and then you can let the quality decay to zero and people will have no choice but to keep paying you money (or to your handful of equally-mediocre competitors).

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necovek 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is why I believe true engineering art comes in actually marrying all three: build great quality quickly at reasonable (small) cost!

If you need it to work for at least a month or two (instead of one and done, which some demoware is like). Following a few rules early on will ensure you can keep evolving it — even if it's MVP/demoware/whatever — as long as you know you need to evolve it soon after you build it!