5 ms·

Why is software quality worse than a decado ago

35 points by laurentiurad 3y ago

laurentiurad 3y ago
[flagged]
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39670657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39670657>
- pestatije 3y ago
  software quality hasnt gotten worse lately
  - laurentiurad 3y ago
    I believe it did. Are you satisfied with the software you use on a daily basis?
    - gtirloni 3y ago
      Yes, much better than the kernel panics, blue screens, easily hacked servers and random crashes of the past.
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        A lot of blue screens were caused by unstable graphics card drivers. Thank Microsoft for moving a lot of the graphics stack to userland in, I think, Vista -since then, GPU driver crashes don't take the entire system out as well.
        Felger 3y ago
        WDDM 1.0 (Windows Display Driver Model) introduced with Vista, indeed came with TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) function for the video adapter, enabling a soft reset when possible. A lot of BSOD were also caused by generic and low quality DRAM sticks, unstable individually (failed addresses) or becoming unstable when paired in dual channel setup, especially with 2 pairs of dual rank, dual sided sticks. Had very often this issue with Corsair Value sticks, or with a XMP (Intel spec) RAM kit used with 1/2/3th gen Ryzen, manually setup to match the 1.35V XMP profile (for DDR4). EXPO does this much better now. Diag tools like Quicktech Pro then Memtest86+ from Passmark Software and the free one were born on this 'lost era'.
    - LouisSayers 3y ago
      Yes, for the most part things work as I would expect them to. I think software has actually gotten much more user friendly to the point where for existing computer users, using a new app is usually quite intuitive. Feelings of dissatisfaction are likely due from having higher expectations.
Arnt 3y ago
Going off on a tangent… I'm not sure whether it's improved or deteriorated IMO, myself. I'm pretty sure I have an opnion, but I'm honestly uncertain what it is. It seems to change by the day. I wrote https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/programming/suckiness-today https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/programming/suckiness-today on a frustrated day long ago, but maybe I'd rather make the opposite point today: If modern code reuse leads to less knowledge of what the (third-paryt) code does, it also brings more function, which is arguably an increase in quality. Take code that uses images an an example: So the development team (and the documentation team, if any) may not know which image formats support alpha channels. But supporting more formats means there's a higher chance that any random image used by an end-user works. Is that overall good or bad? When I wrote that posting I was frustrated, today I might consider the overall extension of functionality to be the most important part. I think. Perhaps.
QuantumG 3y ago
I read this, came back and clicked on the wrong comment section. Funny thing, it wasn't much less entertaining.
yoyohello13 3y ago
It’s always funny when Microsoft explains how important telemetry is for quality control, but their os is worse than ever.
- kccqzy 3y ago
  It's because they changed the definition of quality. Now quality doesn't have much to do with user experience, but rather enhancing Microsoft's revenue.
- jayd16 3y ago
  I'd much rather be on windows 11 than any previous iteration. The biggest issues are things like injecting ads and policies like updates that force restarts and upsells. Stability is certainly much better.
DangitBobby 3y ago
I think the ability to effortlessly deploy updates is the main reason. Why agonize over the quality for months when you can simply release the product before it's ready, then use the actual money you've made to fund fixing it, and roll out the fix with nary a hiccup? And if people didn't like it enough to pay for it in a slightly broken state, they probably don't really want the fixed version either, so when no one buys it you have enough signal to know not to invest time in fixing the buggy bits. I'll tell you this, I'm so glad I have been able to play Helldivers for the last couple of months instead of waiting for it to release while they work the kinks out. Broken software is really annoying, though, so I sympathize with the desire to pin it on competence or laziness.
- jayd16 3y ago
  It's 100% about being able to patch. COD doesn't even ship multiplayer on the disk anymore.
ape4 3y ago
Is the typo (decado) in the title of an article about attention to detail a late April Fools joke?
- Noumenon72 3y ago
  If not that, the bottom popup informing me "We noticed you're visiting from Switzerland. We've updated our prices to Swiss franc for your shopping convenience. Use United States (US) dollar instead" must be. It switched to France the second time I loaded the page. (I'm in the US.)
  - rany_ 3y ago
    I think it's just caching on their end that's causing this issue. If you add any other query param in the URL that message goes away.
bobthepanda 3y ago
These examples all seem rose-colored. * games: there were definitely buggy games being released in the past, the major difference is now they can be fixed. But you have fan made patches for things like SimCity 4 and Skyrim. Heck Nintendo made its whole business off of shipping higher quality software than its buggy competitors in the 80s. * bank software. Consumer facing bank software was worse in the past, I don’t think this is a great example of a category getting worse. * security was also worse back in the day, objectively. If anything we experience more problems because we now expose a greater surface area of our lives to technology
- jeffbee 3y ago
  > Consumer facing bank software was worse in the past The user experience of an ATM has certainly declined over the decades. Monochrome screens with 2 columns of buttons were the pinnacle. But the uselessness of today's ATMs doesn't fall on the software developers, except indirectly. It isn't their fault that the product people wanted it to be the way it is now. If good software engineers refuse to implement bad ideas, the thinkers of the bad idea will simply reach deeper into the barrel to find someone desperate enough to do the job, and the result will be commensurate with this process. That said I generally agree with your point. The lazy article fails to establish the premise.
  - anotherhue 3y ago
    But how else are you going to be tempted by their excellent mortgage rates?
    - jeffbee 3y ago
      Undoubtedly this is what the product manager was thinking. The funny thing is we now have an extremely excellent way to dispense money. It should be possible for me to unlock my phone, enter the amount of cash I want, be directed to the nearest ATM, and just tap that phone on the ATM when I get there and the money comes flying out instantly. We now have technology way beyond what anyone could have imagined in the 1960s, but we aren't exploiting it. The closest we've got is using a mobile phone as a tap card on an ATM, then you continue with the ATM's terrible UI, which is like using 1% of the abilities of the platform.
stevomacdaddy 3y ago
StackOverflow, blind leading the blind.
yamal4321 3y ago
Just wasted 5 minutes
echelon_musk 3y ago
A decado isn't what it used to be.
csdreamer7 3y ago
I do not think people remember how bad software was over a decade ago or even more. Web browsers for example. I remember the days before Firefox got that quantum update and the crashes went down. Chrome tabs crashing. Adobe Flash. Windows Vista came out in 2007. Windows 7: Windows Vista with proper QA and drivers. Windows 8: the user interface. Yes, some of you liked it, most didn't. It was very bad. Internet Explorer... Windows 98... Windows ME... Windows 10 was so much better. Windows 11 is the next Vista phase. Mesa on Linux before Valve started hiring contractors to work on it. Remember the days when a major release of Mesa was based on if it implemented a new version of OpenGL? AMD graphics before AMD properly supported it on Linux. AMD drivers on Windows before Youtubers started actually using AMD cards and complained about the drivers. Games For Windows Live was closed on August 15 2013. This was before fun things like mitigations for hardware vulnerabilities that software has to deal with. Or the growing scale problems AWS has to deal with it controlling 90% of a growing market. Even Bing has gotten... a little better... I guess Mac OS X has objectively gotten worse, but it has been that way since Snow Leopard (half joking). Google search has objectively gotten worse.
- Aardwolf 3y ago
  > Adobe Flash. The fact that it got killed is literally an example of software being worse now than 10 years ago, thousands of fantastic little games were implemented in Flash, this was an easy way to create and distribute games causing many little labors of love being made, and then the deliberate choice was made to kill it. Fortunately the ruffle project revived many of those games now.
  - dvngnt_ 3y ago
    websites used it too.
  - csdreamer7 3y ago
    > thousands of fantastic little games were implemented in Flash True... but also when your right clicked in a Flash widget on Firefox on Linux in would cause the browser to hang. This problem existed for years. That is why I listed it.
csnover 3y ago
The answer is “because the author is engaged in rosy retrospection”. The Atlantic, in 2013: Why is software so slow?[0] Mac Observer, in 2015: OS X quality is declining.[1] Some random programmer blog, in 2015: “Worse Is Better” 25 Years Later – Have We Gotten Lazy?[2] Information Week, in 2009: Paging AIM: Why Does Software Always Get Worse?[3] MIT Technology Review, in 2002: Why software is so bad.[4] [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/why-is-software-so-slow/309422/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/why-is-... [1] https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/mac-experts-weigh-in-os-x-quality-is-declining https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/mac-experts-weigh-in... [2] https://spin.atomicobject.com/worse-is-better-vs-right-thing/ https://spin.atomicobject.com/worse-is-better-vs-right-thing... [3] https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/paging-aim-why-does-software-always-get-worse- https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/paging-aim-why... [4] https://www.technologyreview.com/2002/07/01/40875/why-software-is-so-bad/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2002/07/01/40875/why-softwa...
- taeric 3y ago
  I largely agree with you, but worry that this is poor evidence? Could both be worse now than a decade ago, and as much worse from two decades ago.
  - csnover 3y ago
    What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.[0] The burden of proof is on the author to demonstrate that software quality is actually worse now. If they want to refute the argument that they are engaged in rosy retrospection, then they should offer more than a handful of personal anecdotes that demonstrate nothing. Google Drive lost some data that one time in 2023? Cool. In the 1990s, Windows uptime was measured in BSODs per day, and data loss was predicated on how frequently you remembered to hit Ctrl+S before your computer crashed. Your bank has a frustrating mobile UI? Cool. Ten years ago, they probably didn’t even have a mobile UI, or if it did, people were also complaining that it sucked[1]. Security is worse now because people don’t update their dependencies so leak user data? Cool. The largest known data breach to date happened in 2013[2]. Ten years before that, the entire internet nearly collapsed because of a computer worm[3]. Is any of this a more valid rebuttal to the original author? No. They’re just more anecdotes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor [1] https://reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/30psm7/any_bank_apps_that_dont_suck/ https://reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/30psm7/any_ban... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/technology/yahoo-hack-3-billion-users.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/technology/yahoo-hack-3-b... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer
m463 3y ago
I wonder about these kinds of "things are getting worse" assertions. I might put it a different way: - new software might have more problems than older stable software. - There is exponentially more software being created now - new software is on the forefront of solving more of society's problems - maybe things are getting better? (though there is some dystopian software, like any cookie/privacy dialog) - this might be an example of doing the right things poorly, instead of doing the wrong things well¹. [1] I think of accidental empires "Hippies tend to do the right things poorly; nerds tend to do the wrong things well." https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/10/accidental-empires-part-8-chapter-2-the-tyranny-of-the-normal-distribution/ https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/10/accidental-empires-part-...
osigurdson 3y ago
Do people really still follow Martin Fowler, Uncle Bob and the rest of early naughts gang? It is true that few of these people ever actually made anything. Somehow, they got famous for working on a boring internal project for Chrysler. I agree with the author that people seem to crave "controversy" (perhaps absurdity as well). Fortunately I think it is getting better. Peak nonsense probably occurred about 12 years ago.
- Etheryte 3y ago
  I thought this was a Kubernetes joke, but nope, the first release was nine years ago.
  - osigurdson 3y ago
    I was thinking more in terms of processes. I actually don't think that Kubernetes represents "peak nonsense" at all.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
flkiwi 3y ago
I feel like, very generally speaking, the quality of software (meaning the efficiency, security, and such) has gone way up. It’s a wide range though, with some pretty extreme cases in both directions. The issue I have is what developers are being asked to work on. A technically pretty good product (Edge, say) is saddled with “special offers” and telemetry and other MBA bait. A corollary is a technically excellent product being overproduced and trying to do too much, like Evernote or Plex. We are at the far sales end of the engineer-sales pendulum. I’m hoping things like Boeing’s troubles will give the initiative back to the engineers for a while.
alexvoda 3y ago
I think the article is an unsupported pile of red herrings even though I think apparently the software "quality" has indeed gone down, non-uniformly. The simple explanation for that is that you, the user, are not the customer. A lot of software today simply does not need to cater to the needs of the user because the user has no choice in using the software or not. This is either because of network effects, monopolies, DRM or simply not having the decision power within a hierarchy. Even if software development practices are better than ever, the software developers are less aligned with software users than ever. It is an increasingly adversarial relationship. It is not quality that has gone down, it is an alignment problem.
jongjong 3y ago
I think what makes it worse is that, although there was plenty of bad software 10 years ago, everyone was striving to make it better and could recognize what that meant. Also, most companies were using quality tools and they weren't all using the same silver bullet tools. Although a lot of people at the time in the web space were complaining about there being too many different frameworks, this was actually a good thing because each company used the framework that made the most sense of them. For example, there was a framework called SpoutCore which provided a lot of ready-made components. It would probably not have been suitable for making websites since all the components looked and behaved a certain rigid way but it would have been ideal to build (at the time) an internal dashboard or admin app, for example. Most companies carefully researched and considered what frameworks to use on both the front end and back end. Popularity was just one criterion and it was often the least important one. Nowadays, popularity feels like the only factor being considered when choosing a framework or tool. Companies won't even acknowledge that there are nuances in their projects which might warrant considering different tools. Everything is treated as a silver bullet. One size fits many. Feels like communist-era nonsense where there is only one thing of each kind and big tech has taken the role of the state to decide which one is the correct one.
ergonaught 3y ago
“Supply and demand” coupled with “market pressures” coupled with “this isn’t a science or discipline where lessons learned or knowledge gained is actually carried forward”. It’s a real thing that is actually happening, but a large number of people enjoy convincing themselves that there isn’t anything unique or unusual about present declines. Like so: https://youtu.be/ee6-sI9rdtA https://youtu.be/ee6-sI9rdtA
zer00eyz 3y ago
>>> In my experience, this problem is really prevalent among the youngest people. I had the pleasure to work with brilliant people that are part of the Gen Z bracket, but most of the ones I worked with can’t get anything done. It’s not lack of experience, it’s because they are constantly defaulting to their phones, watching endless videos or even playing games while they are supposed to deliver. As a genx'r Ill tell you this is not true. The desperate need to have assess in seats + money brought a lot of folks to software who arent INTO it. The nerds of ye olden days were different, you were into computers cause you were a geek. GenZ still has geeks (probably fewer of them, computer labs, and computing teachers went away like shop class for this generation). They are just as good as the geeks of previous eras. In fact I would say that the gen z geeks are better off for their age. THe mark the author did miss is that we have decades of tooling. The in it for the money group just adds packages till things work, and that set has been around since 2000 (gen x). Its just that in 2000 they were writing HTML and today they are downloading leftpad (and its decendents). Its only worse because we supercharged their productivity (destructivity).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jayd16 3y ago
Ah yes, it's the young people who are to blame for the perceived industry wide drop in quality. Yeah right.
- laurentiurad 3y ago
  it would be ignorant to blame an entire generation, so I am not doing that. I believe younger people are more informed and more capable than we used to be at that age. However, you cannot deny this is not happening. It's not the culprit, but could definitely be a factor.
diegof79 3y ago
The attack on Martin Fowler is unfair and unnecessary. Fowler became well known because he did a good job at writing and summarizing topics that were interesting for people working with enterprise software a while ago (UML, Refactoring, Enterprise Architecture Patterns). If you read those books without critical thinking and follow them as a recipe, then the problem is not the book's author. I attribute software quality decline to increasing complexity and pressure to deliver faster, confirmation bias (what is the software that we are talking about? Looking back at the time of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, I cannot say that software at that time had more quality), and finally a lost of interest of going “deep” in many areas (I agree with the author on this). Countless times, I talked with engineers in software architecture positions who base their decisions on the latest blog/article that they have read, without too much analysis. But, it doesn't matter if it's Fowler or another author.
archsurface 3y ago
No barrier to entry. No survival of the fittest. Bootcamps and coddling.
jacknews 3y ago
It's just more complex. I worked on a project in the mid-late 90s that had a couple of hundred developers, building a system of maybe 150 db tables not incl. join tables. 20 years later, I worked on a similar sized rails project, with a team of 5. A team of 100s now is going to build something vastly more complex and featured than similar teams before, with a consequential increase in the number of issues. Think of something like a code editor, or spreadsheet. This would be a major project in the 80s - now it's almost a homework assignment.
sumuyuda 3y ago
The last two bigger American tech companies I have worked for in the last decade basically had no dedicated QA testers. They expected developers, designers, and product managers to test features before releasing them. What a joke. This is a total cost cutting measure and resulted in really poor software quality.
stefs 3y ago
> I am really curious how AI is going to exacerbate the quality crisis we see in software nowadays according to a colleague who is also teaching, it's a crisis. there's a whole new crop of software development students who can't program without AI coding assistant help at all.

35 points by laurentiurad 3y ago

laurentiurad 3y ago

[flagged]

dredmorbius 3y ago
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39670657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39670657>
pestatije 3y ago
software quality hasnt gotten worse lately
- laurentiurad 3y ago
  I believe it did. Are you satisfied with the software you use on a daily basis?
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    Yes, much better than the kernel panics, blue screens, easily hacked servers and random crashes of the past.
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      A lot of blue screens were caused by unstable graphics card drivers. Thank Microsoft for moving a lot of the graphics stack to userland in, I think, Vista -since then, GPU driver crashes don't take the entire system out as well.
      - Felger 3y ago
        WDDM 1.0 (Windows Display Driver Model) introduced with Vista, indeed came with TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) function for the video adapter, enabling a soft reset when possible. A lot of BSOD were also caused by generic and low quality DRAM sticks, unstable individually (failed addresses) or becoming unstable when paired in dual channel setup, especially with 2 pairs of dual rank, dual sided sticks. Had very often this issue with Corsair Value sticks, or with a XMP (Intel spec) RAM kit used with 1/2/3th gen Ryzen, manually setup to match the 1.35V XMP profile (for DDR4). EXPO does this much better now. Diag tools like Quicktech Pro then Memtest86+ from Passmark Software and the free one were born on this 'lost era'.
  - LouisSayers 3y ago
    Yes, for the most part things work as I would expect them to. I think software has actually gotten much more user friendly to the point where for existing computer users, using a new app is usually quite intuitive. Feelings of dissatisfaction are likely due from having higher expectations.

Arnt 3y ago

Going off on a tangent… I'm not sure whether it's improved or deteriorated IMO, myself. I'm pretty sure I have an opnion, but I'm honestly uncertain what it is. It seems to change by the day. I wrote https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/programming/suckiness-today https://rant.gulbrandsen.priv.no/programming/suckiness-today on a frustrated day long ago, but maybe I'd rather make the opposite point today: If modern code reuse leads to less knowledge of what the (third-paryt) code does, it also brings more function, which is arguably an increase in quality. Take code that uses images an an example: So the development team (and the documentation team, if any) may not know which image formats support alpha channels. But supporting more formats means there's a higher chance that any random image used by an end-user works. Is that overall good or bad? When I wrote that posting I was frustrated, today I might consider the overall extension of functionality to be the most important part. I think. Perhaps.

QuantumG 3y ago

I read this, came back and clicked on the wrong comment section. Funny thing, it wasn't much less entertaining.

yoyohello13 3y ago

It’s always funny when Microsoft explains how important telemetry is for quality control, but their os is worse than ever.

kccqzy 3y ago
It's because they changed the definition of quality. Now quality doesn't have much to do with user experience, but rather enhancing Microsoft's revenue.
jayd16 3y ago
I'd much rather be on windows 11 than any previous iteration. The biggest issues are things like injecting ads and policies like updates that force restarts and upsells. Stability is certainly much better.

DangitBobby 3y ago

I think the ability to effortlessly deploy updates is the main reason. Why agonize over the quality for months when you can simply release the product before it's ready, then use the actual money you've made to fund fixing it, and roll out the fix with nary a hiccup? And if people didn't like it enough to pay for it in a slightly broken state, they probably don't really want the fixed version either, so when no one buys it you have enough signal to know not to invest time in fixing the buggy bits. I'll tell you this, I'm so glad I have been able to play Helldivers for the last couple of months instead of waiting for it to release while they work the kinks out. Broken software is really annoying, though, so I sympathize with the desire to pin it on competence or laziness.

jayd16 3y ago
It's 100% about being able to patch. COD doesn't even ship multiplayer on the disk anymore.

ape4 3y ago

Is the typo (decado) in the title of an article about attention to detail a late April Fools joke?

Noumenon72 3y ago
If not that, the bottom popup informing me "We noticed you're visiting from Switzerland. We've updated our prices to Swiss franc for your shopping convenience. Use United States (US) dollar instead" must be. It switched to France the second time I loaded the page. (I'm in the US.)
- rany_ 3y ago
  I think it's just caching on their end that's causing this issue. If you add any other query param in the URL that message goes away.

bobthepanda 3y ago

These examples all seem rose-colored. * games: there were definitely buggy games being released in the past, the major difference is now they can be fixed. But you have fan made patches for things like SimCity 4 and Skyrim. Heck Nintendo made its whole business off of shipping higher quality software than its buggy competitors in the 80s. * bank software. Consumer facing bank software was worse in the past, I don’t think this is a great example of a category getting worse. * security was also worse back in the day, objectively. If anything we experience more problems because we now expose a greater surface area of our lives to technology

jeffbee 3y ago
> Consumer facing bank software was worse in the past The user experience of an ATM has certainly declined over the decades. Monochrome screens with 2 columns of buttons were the pinnacle. But the uselessness of today's ATMs doesn't fall on the software developers, except indirectly. It isn't their fault that the product people wanted it to be the way it is now. If good software engineers refuse to implement bad ideas, the thinkers of the bad idea will simply reach deeper into the barrel to find someone desperate enough to do the job, and the result will be commensurate with this process. That said I generally agree with your point. The lazy article fails to establish the premise.
- anotherhue 3y ago
  But how else are you going to be tempted by their excellent mortgage rates?
  - jeffbee 3y ago
    Undoubtedly this is what the product manager was thinking. The funny thing is we now have an extremely excellent way to dispense money. It should be possible for me to unlock my phone, enter the amount of cash I want, be directed to the nearest ATM, and just tap that phone on the ATM when I get there and the money comes flying out instantly. We now have technology way beyond what anyone could have imagined in the 1960s, but we aren't exploiting it. The closest we've got is using a mobile phone as a tap card on an ATM, then you continue with the ATM's terrible UI, which is like using 1% of the abilities of the platform.

stevomacdaddy 3y ago

StackOverflow, blind leading the blind.

yamal4321 3y ago

Just wasted 5 minutes

echelon_musk 3y ago

A decado isn't what it used to be.

csdreamer7 3y ago

I do not think people remember how bad software was over a decade ago or even more. Web browsers for example. I remember the days before Firefox got that quantum update and the crashes went down. Chrome tabs crashing. Adobe Flash. Windows Vista came out in 2007. Windows 7: Windows Vista with proper QA and drivers. Windows 8: the user interface. Yes, some of you liked it, most didn't. It was very bad. Internet Explorer... Windows 98... Windows ME... Windows 10 was so much better. Windows 11 is the next Vista phase. Mesa on Linux before Valve started hiring contractors to work on it. Remember the days when a major release of Mesa was based on if it implemented a new version of OpenGL? AMD graphics before AMD properly supported it on Linux. AMD drivers on Windows before Youtubers started actually using AMD cards and complained about the drivers. Games For Windows Live was closed on August 15 2013. This was before fun things like mitigations for hardware vulnerabilities that software has to deal with. Or the growing scale problems AWS has to deal with it controlling 90% of a growing market. Even Bing has gotten... a little better... I guess Mac OS X has objectively gotten worse, but it has been that way since Snow Leopard (half joking). Google search has objectively gotten worse.

Aardwolf 3y ago
> Adobe Flash. The fact that it got killed is literally an example of software being worse now than 10 years ago, thousands of fantastic little games were implemented in Flash, this was an easy way to create and distribute games causing many little labors of love being made, and then the deliberate choice was made to kill it. Fortunately the ruffle project revived many of those games now.
- dvngnt_ 3y ago
  websites used it too.
- csdreamer7 3y ago
  > thousands of fantastic little games were implemented in Flash True... but also when your right clicked in a Flash widget on Firefox on Linux in would cause the browser to hang. This problem existed for years. That is why I listed it.

csnover 3y ago

The answer is “because the author is engaged in rosy retrospection”. The Atlantic, in 2013: Why is software so slow?[0] Mac Observer, in 2015: OS X quality is declining.[1] Some random programmer blog, in 2015: “Worse Is Better” 25 Years Later – Have We Gotten Lazy?[2] Information Week, in 2009: Paging AIM: Why Does Software Always Get Worse?[3] MIT Technology Review, in 2002: Why software is so bad.[4] [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/why-is-software-so-slow/309422/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/why-is-... [1] https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/mac-experts-weigh-in-os-x-quality-is-declining https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/mac-experts-weigh-in... [2] https://spin.atomicobject.com/worse-is-better-vs-right-thing/ https://spin.atomicobject.com/worse-is-better-vs-right-thing... [3] https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/paging-aim-why-does-software-always-get-worse- https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/paging-aim-why... [4] https://www.technologyreview.com/2002/07/01/40875/why-software-is-so-bad/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2002/07/01/40875/why-softwa...

taeric 3y ago
I largely agree with you, but worry that this is poor evidence? Could both be worse now than a decade ago, and as much worse from two decades ago.
- csnover 3y ago
  What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.[0] The burden of proof is on the author to demonstrate that software quality is actually worse now. If they want to refute the argument that they are engaged in rosy retrospection, then they should offer more than a handful of personal anecdotes that demonstrate nothing. Google Drive lost some data that one time in 2023? Cool. In the 1990s, Windows uptime was measured in BSODs per day, and data loss was predicated on how frequently you remembered to hit Ctrl+S before your computer crashed. Your bank has a frustrating mobile UI? Cool. Ten years ago, they probably didn’t even have a mobile UI, or if it did, people were also complaining that it sucked[1]. Security is worse now because people don’t update their dependencies so leak user data? Cool. The largest known data breach to date happened in 2013[2]. Ten years before that, the entire internet nearly collapsed because of a computer worm[3]. Is any of this a more valid rebuttal to the original author? No. They’re just more anecdotes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor [1] https://reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/30psm7/any_bank_apps_that_dont_suck/ https://reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/30psm7/any_ban... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/technology/yahoo-hack-3-billion-users.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/technology/yahoo-hack-3-b... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer

m463 3y ago

I wonder about these kinds of "things are getting worse" assertions. I might put it a different way: - new software might have more problems than older stable software. - There is exponentially more software being created now - new software is on the forefront of solving more of society's problems - maybe things are getting better? (though there is some dystopian software, like any cookie/privacy dialog) - this might be an example of doing the right things poorly, instead of doing the wrong things well¹. [1] I think of accidental empires "Hippies tend to do the right things poorly; nerds tend to do the wrong things well." https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/10/accidental-empires-part-8-chapter-2-the-tyranny-of-the-normal-distribution/ https://www.cringely.com/2013/02/10/accidental-empires-part-...

osigurdson 3y ago

Do people really still follow Martin Fowler, Uncle Bob and the rest of early naughts gang? It is true that few of these people ever actually made anything. Somehow, they got famous for working on a boring internal project for Chrysler. I agree with the author that people seem to crave "controversy" (perhaps absurdity as well). Fortunately I think it is getting better. Peak nonsense probably occurred about 12 years ago.

Etheryte 3y ago
I thought this was a Kubernetes joke, but nope, the first release was nine years ago.
- osigurdson 3y ago
  I was thinking more in terms of processes. I actually don't think that Kubernetes represents "peak nonsense" at all.

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flkiwi 3y ago

I feel like, very generally speaking, the quality of software (meaning the efficiency, security, and such) has gone way up. It’s a wide range though, with some pretty extreme cases in both directions. The issue I have is what developers are being asked to work on. A technically pretty good product (Edge, say) is saddled with “special offers” and telemetry and other MBA bait. A corollary is a technically excellent product being overproduced and trying to do too much, like Evernote or Plex. We are at the far sales end of the engineer-sales pendulum. I’m hoping things like Boeing’s troubles will give the initiative back to the engineers for a while.

alexvoda 3y ago

I think the article is an unsupported pile of red herrings even though I think apparently the software "quality" has indeed gone down, non-uniformly. The simple explanation for that is that you, the user, are not the customer. A lot of software today simply does not need to cater to the needs of the user because the user has no choice in using the software or not. This is either because of network effects, monopolies, DRM or simply not having the decision power within a hierarchy. Even if software development practices are better than ever, the software developers are less aligned with software users than ever. It is an increasingly adversarial relationship. It is not quality that has gone down, it is an alignment problem.

jongjong 3y ago

I think what makes it worse is that, although there was plenty of bad software 10 years ago, everyone was striving to make it better and could recognize what that meant. Also, most companies were using quality tools and they weren't all using the same silver bullet tools. Although a lot of people at the time in the web space were complaining about there being too many different frameworks, this was actually a good thing because each company used the framework that made the most sense of them. For example, there was a framework called SpoutCore which provided a lot of ready-made components. It would probably not have been suitable for making websites since all the components looked and behaved a certain rigid way but it would have been ideal to build (at the time) an internal dashboard or admin app, for example. Most companies carefully researched and considered what frameworks to use on both the front end and back end. Popularity was just one criterion and it was often the least important one. Nowadays, popularity feels like the only factor being considered when choosing a framework or tool. Companies won't even acknowledge that there are nuances in their projects which might warrant considering different tools. Everything is treated as a silver bullet. One size fits many. Feels like communist-era nonsense where there is only one thing of each kind and big tech has taken the role of the state to decide which one is the correct one.

ergonaught 3y ago

“Supply and demand” coupled with “market pressures” coupled with “this isn’t a science or discipline where lessons learned or knowledge gained is actually carried forward”. It’s a real thing that is actually happening, but a large number of people enjoy convincing themselves that there isn’t anything unique or unusual about present declines. Like so: https://youtu.be/ee6-sI9rdtA https://youtu.be/ee6-sI9rdtA

zer00eyz 3y ago

>>> In my experience, this problem is really prevalent among the youngest people. I had the pleasure to work with brilliant people that are part of the Gen Z bracket, but most of the ones I worked with can’t get anything done. It’s not lack of experience, it’s because they are constantly defaulting to their phones, watching endless videos or even playing games while they are supposed to deliver. As a genx'r Ill tell you this is not true. The desperate need to have assess in seats + money brought a lot of folks to software who arent INTO it. The nerds of ye olden days were different, you were into computers cause you were a geek. GenZ still has geeks (probably fewer of them, computer labs, and computing teachers went away like shop class for this generation). They are just as good as the geeks of previous eras. In fact I would say that the gen z geeks are better off for their age. THe mark the author did miss is that we have decades of tooling. The in it for the money group just adds packages till things work, and that set has been around since 2000 (gen x). Its just that in 2000 they were writing HTML and today they are downloading leftpad (and its decendents). Its only worse because we supercharged their productivity (destructivity).

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jayd16 3y ago

Ah yes, it's the young people who are to blame for the perceived industry wide drop in quality. Yeah right.

laurentiurad 3y ago
it would be ignorant to blame an entire generation, so I am not doing that. I believe younger people are more informed and more capable than we used to be at that age. However, you cannot deny this is not happening. It's not the culprit, but could definitely be a factor.

diegof79 3y ago

The attack on Martin Fowler is unfair and unnecessary. Fowler became well known because he did a good job at writing and summarizing topics that were interesting for people working with enterprise software a while ago (UML, Refactoring, Enterprise Architecture Patterns). If you read those books without critical thinking and follow them as a recipe, then the problem is not the book's author. I attribute software quality decline to increasing complexity and pressure to deliver faster, confirmation bias (what is the software that we are talking about? Looking back at the time of MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, I cannot say that software at that time had more quality), and finally a lost of interest of going “deep” in many areas (I agree with the author on this). Countless times, I talked with engineers in software architecture positions who base their decisions on the latest blog/article that they have read, without too much analysis. But, it doesn't matter if it's Fowler or another author.

archsurface 3y ago

No barrier to entry. No survival of the fittest. Bootcamps and coddling.

jacknews 3y ago

It's just more complex. I worked on a project in the mid-late 90s that had a couple of hundred developers, building a system of maybe 150 db tables not incl. join tables. 20 years later, I worked on a similar sized rails project, with a team of 5. A team of 100s now is going to build something vastly more complex and featured than similar teams before, with a consequential increase in the number of issues. Think of something like a code editor, or spreadsheet. This would be a major project in the 80s - now it's almost a homework assignment.

sumuyuda 3y ago

The last two bigger American tech companies I have worked for in the last decade basically had no dedicated QA testers. They expected developers, designers, and product managers to test features before releasing them. What a joke. This is a total cost cutting measure and resulted in really poor software quality.

stefs 3y ago

> I am really curious how AI is going to exacerbate the quality crisis we see in software nowadays according to a colleague who is also teaching, it's a crisis. there's a whole new crop of software development students who can't program without AI coding assistant help at all.