4 ms·

This completely ignores the fact that bugs which make it into production erode the reputation of the company in the eyes of their customers. Lost reputation is

This completely ignores the fact that bugs which make it into production erode the reputation of the company in the eyes of their customers. Lost reputation is much, much worse than being wasteful with dev hours.

scarface74 8y ago
I use to believe that to always be the case. But then I worked for a company that didn’t really care about quality they just wanted to add features to mark off a checklist in a pursuit to either get more funding or get acquired That can work - see Twitter.
- cellularmitosis 8y ago
  Right, but when customers are putting up with a crappy product, they are just waiting for a better alternative to come along. That's a huge liability to be sitting on -- just ask MySpace.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    That actually proves my point. The original founder sold to News Corp just as Facebook was taking over in 2009. The strategy was a success depending on where you stand....
    - cellularmitosis 8y ago
      Our difference of opinion hinges on the ambiguity of “success”. Here you use “success” strictly in the sense of making a financial gain, while MySpace’s users would have called it a failure.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        Isn’t that the metric that all investor funded startups use - either being acquired or going public at some multiple of their original investment? Unless I’m working at a job where I’m serving some greater good, my definition of success is did I help achieve the company’s objectives, get paid well, and will I be able to use my coworkers and management as references in the future.
        cellularmitosis 8y ago
        Your position is that financial gain is the only metric that matters and that the quality or longevity of the product is irrelevant, and my position is that that's a concise summary of everything that's wrong with "tech". We agree to disagree.
        scarface74 8y ago
        How much code that is run by most user facing businesses Is the same code that was used 10 years ago no matter how good it is? No matter how great my Perl code was running 15 years and 5 companies ago, I doubt they are still using it. The code that runs Amazon.com, Google.com, etc. is nothing like what they ran 10 years ago. Besides, we aren’t talking about feeding starving children here. We are talking about the death of a social media platform. But more generically, if yet another software as a service CRUD app dies, whose hurt besides the investors who expect most of their startups to fail and the developers who can walk down the street and get another job in a week? As an individual, why am I going to fight the loosing battle of trying to implement great code quality and test coverage when I’m being incentivized by how many features my team can pump out as cheaply as possible by hiring a bunch of poorly paid developers overseas? We call what we do “engineering” but there is a world of difference. If my program fails that is running a SAAS app, the user gets a 500 error. If a mechanical engineer rushes, people die.
  - cellularmitosis 8y ago
    To your point though, I can see a strategic path of "crappy until we get enough funding and users that we can go back and redo it". In practice though, most companies never seem to polish a shipped feature -- they instead focus on adding more mediocre features. I would love to see this trend reversed of course! But software in our age seems doomed to short lifespans and mediocre quality.
anonytrary 8y ago
It depends entirely on the bugs. If a bug's reproduction-path is rare enough that a non-critical mass of users runs into it, then it's not going to make a difference. Reddit, for example, is currently bogged down with login bugs, redirect bugs, redesign bugs, etc. and they're simply not prevalent enough to get people to mass exodus off of Reddit. Reddit will continue to grow fast even with these bugs. The vast majority of user-seen bugs are not common. The common ones are usually caught with testing.

scarface74 8y ago

I use to believe that to always be the case. But then I worked for a company that didn’t really care about quality they just wanted to add features to mark off a checklist in a pursuit to either get more funding or get acquired That can work - see Twitter.

cellularmitosis 8y ago
Right, but when customers are putting up with a crappy product, they are just waiting for a better alternative to come along. That's a huge liability to be sitting on -- just ask MySpace.
- scarface74 8y ago
  That actually proves my point. The original founder sold to News Corp just as Facebook was taking over in 2009. The strategy was a success depending on where you stand....
  - cellularmitosis 8y ago
    Our difference of opinion hinges on the ambiguity of “success”. Here you use “success” strictly in the sense of making a financial gain, while MySpace’s users would have called it a failure.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Isn’t that the metric that all investor funded startups use - either being acquired or going public at some multiple of their original investment? Unless I’m working at a job where I’m serving some greater good, my definition of success is did I help achieve the company’s objectives, get paid well, and will I be able to use my coworkers and management as references in the future.
      - cellularmitosis 8y ago
        Your position is that financial gain is the only metric that matters and that the quality or longevity of the product is irrelevant, and my position is that that's a concise summary of everything that's wrong with "tech". We agree to disagree.
        scarface74 8y ago
        How much code that is run by most user facing businesses Is the same code that was used 10 years ago no matter how good it is? No matter how great my Perl code was running 15 years and 5 companies ago, I doubt they are still using it. The code that runs Amazon.com, Google.com, etc. is nothing like what they ran 10 years ago. Besides, we aren’t talking about feeding starving children here. We are talking about the death of a social media platform. But more generically, if yet another software as a service CRUD app dies, whose hurt besides the investors who expect most of their startups to fail and the developers who can walk down the street and get another job in a week? As an individual, why am I going to fight the loosing battle of trying to implement great code quality and test coverage when I’m being incentivized by how many features my team can pump out as cheaply as possible by hiring a bunch of poorly paid developers overseas? We call what we do “engineering” but there is a world of difference. If my program fails that is running a SAAS app, the user gets a 500 error. If a mechanical engineer rushes, people die.
- cellularmitosis 8y ago
  To your point though, I can see a strategic path of "crappy until we get enough funding and users that we can go back and redo it". In practice though, most companies never seem to polish a shipped feature -- they instead focus on adding more mediocre features. I would love to see this trend reversed of course! But software in our age seems doomed to short lifespans and mediocre quality.

anonytrary 8y ago

It depends entirely on the bugs. If a bug's reproduction-path is rare enough that a non-critical mass of users runs into it, then it's not going to make a difference. Reddit, for example, is currently bogged down with login bugs, redirect bugs, redesign bugs, etc. and they're simply not prevalent enough to get people to mass exodus off of Reddit. Reddit will continue to grow fast even with these bugs. The vast majority of user-seen bugs are not common. The common ones are usually caught with testing.