5 ms·

"customer could not care less". This perspective is too narrow, or even a fallacy, often repeated to justify abandoning some good practices. Oh yeah customer c

• jagged-chisel 2y ago
  In software, all that is hidden from the end customer. How do you look for the smart choices in code made by the team who implemented any of the software you download and install?
  • FroshKiller 2y ago
    Poor choices during development reveal themselves in many ways: poor performance, awkward workflows, mandatory upgrades, one-way data conversions, inaccurate documentation, and so on.
    • pif 2y ago
      > Poor choices during development reveal themselves in many ways: ... All the examples you provided miss the point. Revenues are the point; all the rest is ancillary at best.
      • FroshKiller 2y ago
        I'm not sure what you mean. jagged-chisel asked how we look for smart choices in the software we download and install. I gave examples of how poor choices manifest for end users, the idea being that a lack of those issues suggests smart choices. I don't see how revenue is relevant to the question. Revenue for whom? And how did my examples miss the point exactly?
    • lelanthran 2y ago
      > Poor choices during development reveal themselves in many ways: poor performance, awkward workflows, mandatory upgrades, one-way data conversions, inaccurate documentation, and so on. Not necessarily. Some otherwise good systems might have one bug in each of those categories. And, most other poorly designed and poorly executed systems just chug along fine without the customer realising anything.
      • stouset 2y ago
        Sure, fine, a well-designed system can have bugs and a giant ball of duct tape and twine can work great. That's not the norm though and I hope we can all acknowledge that.
  • kunley 2y ago
    Oh believe me, I use a lot of corporate software where the flaws in development are obvious, without knowing any of the people involved
    • karatinversion 2y ago
      Doesn’t the fact you do use it mean the customer (the one who chooses the vendor) did not care, though?
      • Supermancho 2y ago
        Choices of vendor are not binary. There are tradeoffs between available solutions in software. Software Quality is not a linear gradient. If your solution is the best compromise, it is more likely to be selected.
        • kunley 2y ago
          Well at companies is much less compromise than politics. Over decaces I saw two main schemas: - product must be purchased because its vendor is somehow connected to the upper management or the investor - product must be purchased because the person who has chosen the product is at the moment perceived as having some kind of holy cow status and can't be criticized, so people around put that to the extreme Happening at most of companies everywhere.
      • kunley 2y ago
        That's obviously different because at the corp level there are politics involved in choosing one vendor over another, but at the same time wheverer I'm involved in the decision process I care to avoid these products as hell.
      • axus 2y ago
        If you're in one place for more than a few years, you become the person making these choices, and you don't forget.
• lelanthran 2y ago
  > Oh yeah customer cares. If I leave my car in a workshop, I care whether mechanics have one big mess there or not, I am looking for signs of a good routine, clever process, some smart choices they made for themselves. If they did a fix for me but have a mess, I will never go back to them. In your car, you can tell, in software you cannot. Add in the fact that most times even cowboy-coded systems are once off and will be replaced (and not maintained) down the line, and you really cannot tell if the system was written as a huge mess just waiting to be exploited, or as a well-crafted and resilient system, because the majority of systems are in-house only and face no adverserial threats other than the employees.
  • kunley 2y ago
    I respectfully disagree. I can tell about bad development habits from using the software it because code smell (and process smell) stinks. Besides, I was telling not about car repair per se, but about the process around car repairing, which is visible when you visit car workshop and talk to the guys, and is even more visible when you use the software. Concrete examples: - installation/upgrade process involving interactive scripts means that somebody thought dumbing down such process for a tiny percent of less-tech users is ok, disregarding the majority who automate everything (and interactive scripts are obviously harder to automate); it also can be a sign that vendor's decision maker (product owner) is disconnected from reality - poor documentation; a distinct case here is when part of the product is an API and of course "there is" documentation, generated by Swagger - but the crucial part of it are some subtleties of arguments passed which are themselves undocumented, making the whole API simply unusable. The vendor has an excuse "but we have documentation" - heck yes, it's because your employees hate their superiors so they gave them something to f*ck off; and this is given to the customer. Very common practice actually, I can give you a list of vendors who notoriously do that - painfully slow webapps are a sign of a process smell that no one thinks about the real world operations; sometimes it's not even about scalability, but bad choice/usage of libraries; i need to give here names, in rot13 so it's not googlable: Argfhvgr has a HR product for corporations where every single damn click on any active field in the browser - and you click it a lot because it is fscking calendar - triggers a series of round trips to the server, each taking over 2 seconds. The usability of this product is so braindead at so many levels that I can see a whole bunch of teams failing to stop this sh*t from being released & sold. Long story but a good example that just by using the product you can see how rotten the vendor must be