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Disclaimer: working for Google, a Big Tech company. While enshittification is certainly real, stock value or company size can't explain it all. Do startups pro

by larsrc 3y ago

Disclaimer: working for Google, a Big Tech company. While enshittification is certainly real, stock value or company size can't explain it all. Do startups produce shining examples of high-quality code? Not from what I've heard. It's whatever hack gets it working. Google had put a lot of work into cleaning up the messes of the past, and from what I hear from Xooglers has one of the nicest code bases around. Quality code is hard to write. Code that works for now is pretty easy. Anyone under pressure to produce code quickly will produce crappier code. Which means every startup, every Big Tech company, everything in between, and all the other companies suddenly depending on software. And then there are us engineers. We get a kick out of making things work, we love starting new projects, we are enamored of the newest framework. But carrying the task through all the way to nice finished products with full test coverage and beautiful code is a slog. It's easy to blame capitalism, and it has its share of the blame. But we cannot absolve ourselves that easily.

DinaCoder99 3y ago
> Do startups produce shining examples of high-quality code? Presumably this is about the quality of the end software, not the code that feeds it. some classes of startups are certainly known for attempting to improve quality apparent to the end-user over market leaders. Some even succeed. For the most part this isn't hard compared to "big tech"—just strip out the enterprise-oriented crap and ads. The hard part of making a business writing software is profiting off it without destroying it.
- larsrc 3y ago
  The list in the article lists more code quality issues than user visible issues. And frankly, bugs and UI flakiness are everywhere.
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    everywhere your budgeting allows them to be. there are high quality products out there, not really from your company, but they're there where people care to invest in software instead of selling ads at a better margin.
  - DinaCoder99 3y ago
    > And frankly, bugs and UI flakiness are everywhere. Of course, but the most flagrant offenders in this regard are not startups. Insurance, banking, enterprise SaaS, and credit bureaus dominate the field of objectively terrible, buggy, and difficult-to-use software. "Big Tech" (at least referring to the largest american companies) are far from the worst offenders in this regard, which makes me somewhat confused as to what the article has an issue with. Hell from my perspective half the big tech companies are putting out higher quality software than ever!
asadotzler 3y ago
Start-ups don't have 100000+ employees to get everything right. Google does. The caliber of comments has deteriorated significantly on this site in the last decade. It's almost as if a new generation of money chasers invaded and displaced the actual hackers.
- gipp 3y ago
  ? If anything, working at that scale -- with far more points of interaction, across a colossally higher surface area -- makes the problem of maintaining general quality far harder. The amount of money and headcount available to throw at it is almost completely irrelevant, because there are no economies of scale to be found in this problem space. GPs point, I think, is where are these supposed small/medium tech companies with such dedication and success in maintaining quality? This seems like a pretty universal problem across all tech, not anything specific to "big" tech. I'm not sure where you're finding these supposed "high quality" startup products; their offerings are almost universally even worse IME. Moreover, the personal jab at the end is quite confusing. You might disagree with GPs point, but the "caliber" of their comment seems quite decent, and certainly far higher than your own.
- troupo 3y ago
  You ship your org chart. Worse than that, you also ship your org chart changes over time: https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY?si=AZUq9OIUHjOiT4fx https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY?si=AZUq9OIUHjOiT4fx A company with 100k employees will ship crap just by default. And Google is a shining example of that.
- larsrc 3y ago
  Google has 100000+ employees to create mess, and not nearly enough to clean up that mess. They have done a _lot_ to improve the coding culture over the years, without that it would have been unworkable. As for the generations, may I have the honour of knowing your age, my friend?

by larsrc 3y ago

DinaCoder99 3y ago

> Do startups produce shining examples of high-quality code? Presumably this is about the quality of the end software, not the code that feeds it. some classes of startups are certainly known for attempting to improve quality apparent to the end-user over market leaders. Some even succeed. For the most part this isn't hard compared to "big tech"—just strip out the enterprise-oriented crap and ads. The hard part of making a business writing software is profiting off it without destroying it.

larsrc 3y ago
The list in the article lists more code quality issues than user visible issues. And frankly, bugs and UI flakiness are everywhere.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  everywhere your budgeting allows them to be. there are high quality products out there, not really from your company, but they're there where people care to invest in software instead of selling ads at a better margin.
- DinaCoder99 3y ago
  > And frankly, bugs and UI flakiness are everywhere. Of course, but the most flagrant offenders in this regard are not startups. Insurance, banking, enterprise SaaS, and credit bureaus dominate the field of objectively terrible, buggy, and difficult-to-use software. "Big Tech" (at least referring to the largest american companies) are far from the worst offenders in this regard, which makes me somewhat confused as to what the article has an issue with. Hell from my perspective half the big tech companies are putting out higher quality software than ever!

asadotzler 3y ago

Start-ups don't have 100000+ employees to get everything right. Google does. The caliber of comments has deteriorated significantly on this site in the last decade. It's almost as if a new generation of money chasers invaded and displaced the actual hackers.

gipp 3y ago
? If anything, working at that scale -- with far more points of interaction, across a colossally higher surface area -- makes the problem of maintaining general quality far harder. The amount of money and headcount available to throw at it is almost completely irrelevant, because there are no economies of scale to be found in this problem space. GPs point, I think, is where are these supposed small/medium tech companies with such dedication and success in maintaining quality? This seems like a pretty universal problem across all tech, not anything specific to "big" tech. I'm not sure where you're finding these supposed "high quality" startup products; their offerings are almost universally even worse IME. Moreover, the personal jab at the end is quite confusing. You might disagree with GPs point, but the "caliber" of their comment seems quite decent, and certainly far higher than your own.
troupo 3y ago
You ship your org chart. Worse than that, you also ship your org chart changes over time: https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY?si=AZUq9OIUHjOiT4fx https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY?si=AZUq9OIUHjOiT4fx A company with 100k employees will ship crap just by default. And Google is a shining example of that.
larsrc 3y ago
Google has 100000+ employees to create mess, and not nearly enough to clean up that mess. They have done a _lot_ to improve the coding culture over the years, without that it would have been unworkable. As for the generations, may I have the honour of knowing your age, my friend?