3 ms·

Its actually amazing news, worse software quality means more oportunities for hackers and better tools

by xkcd1963 1y ago

mc3301 1y ago
Or people just become satisfied with lower quality. Hand-crafted chairs from a woodworker used to be the only way to get a chair. You'd get an amazing, life-long chair with no flaws. Now that chairs are cheaply made in factories, we can have multiple different chairs with many flaws. And just toss them out and go on to the next one when needed. But... those sturdy beautiful fine-wordworker-made chairs are still being built. They are just more rare, expensive, and special than ever before.
- myaccountonhn 1y ago
  Yeah that's where I think it's going. Quality software will have no space but a niche, and so your customers will be the top 1% that can afford it.
- listenallyall 1y ago
  You actually believe that not a single woodworker said to himself, there are only so many wealthy people, I might do better if I make some chairs from cheap wood in a hurry, not doing so much polishing or ornamentaion, and I can make twice as many and sell to the not-so-rich people? You really don't think that existed?
  - guappa 1y ago
    One of the reasons of the downfall of Florence was that they didn't enter the low quality textile market and remained on the high end stuff.
    - listenallyall 1y ago
      the fact that low-quality goods/markets existed, whether textiles or chairs, contradicts the OP's original comment and solidifies mine: "the only way to get a chair... an amazing, life-long chair with no flaws"
nyarlathotep_ 1y ago
I have to disagree here based on experience--the majority of software projects I've worked on really didn't care much for "quality" in any sense. A HUGE portion of work in f500 companies that are non-software firms is outsourced--these companies spend loads of cash on consulting companies (yes, those ones) that often produce results to which the description of sub-par would be a compliment. There's been various cases made public, but more often is routine and poor quality mundane work that's way over budget and barely meets requirements. If anything, the prevalence and adoption of LLM-generated code will increase the quality in a lot of places. If you've never had to wade through something that one of Those Companies wrote, you have no idea how bad it gets and how frequently this is the case. We just saw DOGE-related cuts to Accenture and Deloitte--these companies have huge contracts all over the place, not just public sector. There's a massive amount of crap out there. Most companies do not care, do not understand "quality" outside of some cargo-culted notion of "clean", have only adopted modern practices as some sort of ritual* of Things You Do without any assessment on what tangibly works or doesn't, have no understanding of how to attract skilled professionals, nor assess them, nor nurture them. Often their definition of skilled is a resume that contains the proper "experience" with whatever Java/Angular/React/we-love-containers thing they use. With the right number of "years" near it. *a recent example--company has GH Actions with CI/CD for every commit on all branches but routinely suffers delays due to misconfigurations, runner issues, and other headaches. Code Reviews for PRs exist but are basically pedantry that just slow down deployments ("change this to switch over if-else") while missing crucial bugs, randomly updating major dependencies cause vague security warning that breaks interfaces and other APIs. All this and more--and this is one of the better examples I can think of, in terms of "quality." I'm saying this as I worked at a Pretty Good consulting company that's business model changed to sub-outsourcing some of the labor to some of These Companies and often had to fix, assist, push back on, work extra to clean up, the various decisions made in these cases. I also "inherited" and worked on fixes for things left behind by some of these places. Good thing is there often was low-hanging fruit. Extra and overprovisioned cloud resources wasting $$ and the like, absurd architectures with extra dbs and queues, and all sorts of nightmares.

Its actually amazing news, worse software quality means more oportunities for hackers and better tools

Or people just become satisfied with lower quality. Hand-crafted chairs from a woodworker used to be the only way to get a chair. You'd get an amazing, life-long chair with no flaws. Now that chairs are cheaply made in factories, we can have multiple different chairs with many flaws. And just toss them out and go on to the next one when needed. But... those sturdy beautiful fine-wordworker-made chairs are still being built. They are just more rare, expensive, and special than ever before.

myaccountonhn 1y ago
Yeah that's where I think it's going. Quality software will have no space but a niche, and so your customers will be the top 1% that can afford it.
listenallyall 1y ago
You actually believe that not a single woodworker said to himself, there are only so many wealthy people, I might do better if I make some chairs from cheap wood in a hurry, not doing so much polishing or ornamentaion, and I can make twice as many and sell to the not-so-rich people? You really don't think that existed?
- guappa 1y ago
  One of the reasons of the downfall of Florence was that they didn't enter the low quality textile market and remained on the high end stuff.
  - listenallyall 1y ago
    the fact that low-quality goods/markets existed, whether textiles or chairs, contradicts the OP's original comment and solidifies mine: "the only way to get a chair... an amazing, life-long chair with no flaws"

nyarlathotep_ 1y ago

I have to disagree here based on experience--the majority of software projects I've worked on really didn't care much for "quality" in any sense. A HUGE portion of work in f500 companies that are non-software firms is outsourced--these companies spend loads of cash on consulting companies (yes, those ones) that often produce results to which the description of sub-par would be a compliment. There's been various cases made public, but more often is routine and poor quality mundane work that's way over budget and barely meets requirements. If anything, the prevalence and adoption of LLM-generated code will increase the quality in a lot of places. If you've never had to wade through something that one of Those Companies wrote, you have no idea how bad it gets and how frequently this is the case. We just saw DOGE-related cuts to Accenture and Deloitte--these companies have huge contracts all over the place, not just public sector. There's a massive amount of crap out there. Most companies do not care, do not understand "quality" outside of some cargo-culted notion of "clean", have only adopted modern practices as some sort of ritual* of Things You Do without any assessment on what tangibly works or doesn't, have no understanding of how to attract skilled professionals, nor assess them, nor nurture them. Often their definition of skilled is a resume that contains the proper "experience" with whatever Java/Angular/React/we-love-containers thing they use. With the right number of "years" near it. *a recent example--company has GH Actions with CI/CD for every commit on all branches but routinely suffers delays due to misconfigurations, runner issues, and other headaches. Code Reviews for PRs exist but are basically pedantry that just slow down deployments ("change this to switch over if-else") while missing crucial bugs, randomly updating major dependencies cause vague security warning that breaks interfaces and other APIs. All this and more--and this is one of the better examples I can think of, in terms of "quality." I'm saying this as I worked at a Pretty Good consulting company that's business model changed to sub-outsourcing some of the labor to some of These Companies and often had to fix, assist, push back on, work extra to clean up, the various decisions made in these cases. I also "inherited" and worked on fixes for things left behind by some of these places. Good thing is there often was low-hanging fruit. Extra and overprovisioned cloud resources wasting $$ and the like, absurd architectures with extra dbs and queues, and all sorts of nightmares.