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Sure you are being paid for a solution. But you are also probably being paid for a quality solution. I'm not sure you would want your house built by the contra

Sure you are being paid for a solution. But you are also probably being paid for a quality solution. I'm not sure you would want your house built by the contractor that took short cuts and did shoddy work. You might have roof over your head, but there will be more expensive problems later.

htrp 3y ago
> I'm not sure you would want your house built by the contractor that took short cuts and did shoddy work. You might have roof over your head, but there will be more expensive problems later. You might want to pick a better analogy as you've literally described all roofing construction at this point
commandlinefan 3y ago
I fear that we do ourselves a disservice by trying to draw physical-world analogies - if a roofing contractor screws things up, it's really easy for a non-roofing-contractor to see: the roof leaks. You call the guy and point out the leak so he fixes the leak. What's the equivalent of "leaky" software? Users can observe bugs, and they can observe slowness. Experienced developers know that what we call "poor quality" code is more prone to bugs and slowness, which they _do_ care about. They don't (and shouldn't) care about maintainability, they care about functionality: we should keep harping on performance and testability rather than esoteric "quality".
- not_the_fda 3y ago
  If you don't pay attention to the quality of the software, eventually it becomes unmaintainable and you can no longer add features in a timely manner and you get crushed by your nimble competitors. One company I worked for was once the market leader, but over the years they failed to maintain the quality of the software. They kept adding more and more resources to get stuff out. Eventually it took them three years to get out a new release only for it to be so bug ridden they had to pull it. They are no longer in existence because they had the mentality of all that matters is features.
- Tainnor 3y ago
  I sometimes use software that is incredibly buggy and seems unable to add simple features people have been asking for for years (even though they are promising to implement it). I obviously can't say exactly what the precise problems with the code base are, but it's rather easy to conclude that it must be a total mess.

htrp 3y ago

> I'm not sure you would want your house built by the contractor that took short cuts and did shoddy work. You might have roof over your head, but there will be more expensive problems later. You might want to pick a better analogy as you've literally described all roofing construction at this point

commandlinefan 3y ago

I fear that we do ourselves a disservice by trying to draw physical-world analogies - if a roofing contractor screws things up, it's really easy for a non-roofing-contractor to see: the roof leaks. You call the guy and point out the leak so he fixes the leak. What's the equivalent of "leaky" software? Users can observe bugs, and they can observe slowness. Experienced developers know that what we call "poor quality" code is more prone to bugs and slowness, which they _do_ care about. They don't (and shouldn't) care about maintainability, they care about functionality: we should keep harping on performance and testability rather than esoteric "quality".

not_the_fda 3y ago
If you don't pay attention to the quality of the software, eventually it becomes unmaintainable and you can no longer add features in a timely manner and you get crushed by your nimble competitors. One company I worked for was once the market leader, but over the years they failed to maintain the quality of the software. They kept adding more and more resources to get stuff out. Eventually it took them three years to get out a new release only for it to be so bug ridden they had to pull it. They are no longer in existence because they had the mentality of all that matters is features.
Tainnor 3y ago
I sometimes use software that is incredibly buggy and seems unable to add simple features people have been asking for for years (even though they are promising to implement it). I obviously can't say exactly what the precise problems with the code base are, but it's rather easy to conclude that it must be a total mess.