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> bottom ~80% of the industry. The top ~20% How are you defining "top" and "bottom" here? I can agree with the 80/20 split, but I don't think it necessarily

> bottom ~80% of the industry. The top ~20% How are you defining "top" and "bottom" here? I can agree with the 80/20 split, but I don't think it necessarily tracks with, say, name recognition or market cap. Amazon, for example, utterly failed on their last Prime day, and from the discussions of those Amazonians I know, it was pretty much inevitable. The REASON these fast-and-loose habits are habits are because, when they work, they make money. You can't look at a lottery and say the winners "did it right" and the losers didn't - the winners just haven't failed yet. Those companies that AREN'T trying to grow at ridiculous speeds but ARE trying to maintain quality (and are fortunate enough to be in a market niche that supports that) are the ones most likely to have bulletproof reliability. Those won't be the "top" companies by most peoples definitions.

StreamBright 8y ago
>> , for example, utterly failed on their last Prime day, and from the discussions of those Amazonians I know, it was pretty much inevitable I am not familiar what happened. I am also ex-Amzn. I think there is also a dimension to this, scale. With Amazon's scale there are quite different challeges then in a smaller company. There are solutions that could not possible scale to their needs. Fast-and-lose was largely introduced when Google and Facebook got entered the scene. I remember that Google did a survey and most of the users were ok with some breakage and get the newest features ASAP. Many people concluded based on this that all software development is like that. Ironically Facebook lately adopted certain technologies to reduce the amount of bugs in their frontend code (ReasonML). I think there is a large distance between bulletproof and feck-all reliability. Top companies are closer to the bulletproof range of the spectrum while bottom companies closer to the feck-all end.
- user5994461 8y ago
  It's easy to rank companies from top to bottom. Whether there is source control, automated build, tests, reproducible scripted deployment, code reviews, test environments, bug tracker, logs, monitoring of hardware usage, analytics, backup. Each of these is strongly correlated to quality.

StreamBright 8y ago

>> , for example, utterly failed on their last Prime day, and from the discussions of those Amazonians I know, it was pretty much inevitable I am not familiar what happened. I am also ex-Amzn. I think there is also a dimension to this, scale. With Amazon's scale there are quite different challeges then in a smaller company. There are solutions that could not possible scale to their needs. Fast-and-lose was largely introduced when Google and Facebook got entered the scene. I remember that Google did a survey and most of the users were ok with some breakage and get the newest features ASAP. Many people concluded based on this that all software development is like that. Ironically Facebook lately adopted certain technologies to reduce the amount of bugs in their frontend code (ReasonML). I think there is a large distance between bulletproof and feck-all reliability. Top companies are closer to the bulletproof range of the spectrum while bottom companies closer to the feck-all end.

user5994461 8y ago
It's easy to rank companies from top to bottom. Whether there is source control, automated build, tests, reproducible scripted deployment, code reviews, test environments, bug tracker, logs, monitoring of hardware usage, analytics, backup. Each of these is strongly correlated to quality.