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This article makes a fundamental mistake where the author thinks that business values quality. Business has never valued quality. Customers can value quality, b
by vinceguidry 1y ago
This article makes a fundamental mistake where the author thinks that business values quality. Business has never valued quality. Customers can value quality, but business only values profit margins. If customers will only buy quality, then that's what business will deliver. But customers don't value quality either, most of the time. They value bang-for-buck. They'll buy the cheapest tools on Amazon and happily vibe code their way into a hole, then throw the broke code out and vibe code some more.
The only people that value quality are engineers. Any predictions of the future by engineers that rely on other people suddenly valuing quality can safely be ignored.
- throw234234234 1y agoDepends solely on the domain IMO. There are domains where stakeholders absolutely value quality (e.g. loss of revenue, fines and other consequences). This isn't universally true.
- philosopher1234 1y agoBusinesses can value quality in cost centers because it can bring costs down
- vinceguidry 1y agoIndividual managers can. The business as a whole is looking at a much bigger picture. But what managers value is throughput, not necessarily unit economics. They'll accept faster delivery at worse unit economics.
- prmph 1y agoI don't know where you get the impression that customer's don't value quality. They value quality, a lot. If customers didn't value quality, then every startup would have succeeded, just by providing the most barely functioning product at the cheapest prices, and making enough revenue by volume.
- vinceguidry 1y ago> startup would have succeeded, just by providing the most barely functioning product at the cheapest prices, and making enough revenue by volume. You've just described hustle culture. And yes, it does lead to business success. Engineers don't like hustle.
- prmph 1y agoYep, but most hustles fail, the number of startups that succeed is like, what, 5 or 10%?
- vinceguidry 1y agoHustles don't fail, why would you think they would? Customers love hiring hustlers. Startups fail because they want software economics, not hustle economics. If you're willing to accept hustle economics, you'll never run out of work.
- prmph 1y agoWeird arguments you are making. I'm talking about startup business. > Hustles don't fail Then by definition there should be few engineers with financial problems, right? Almost every engineer wants to succeed with their side hustle
- vinceguidry 1y agoNo engineer wants to hustle. You're still only thinking in terms of startups. I'm thinking about landscapers and ticket scalpers. No engineer is doing that. But if you were willing to, you'd make money.
- kerkeslager 1y agoYou're not communicating well--it's unclear what you mean by "hustle". It's also pretty unlikely that speaking in absolutes ("no engineer") is correct here. It sounds a lot like you're saying "all engineers are lazy" and that's just obviously wrong.
- ayrtondesozzla 1y agoI'd change that line near the end to: The only people that often value quality are engineers. I might even add that the overwhelming majority of engineers are happy to sacrifice quality - and ethics generally - when the price is right. Not all, maybe. It's a strange culture we have, one which readily produces engineer types capable of complex logic in their work, and at the same time, "the overarching concern of business is always profit" seems to sometimes cause difficulty.
- ndiddy 1y agoI think quality can be a differentiator in some cases. When the iPhone came out, there were other phones running Windows Phone and Symbian that had more features and cost less. However, the iPhone was successful anyway because it ran smoother and had a more polished UI than its competitors.
- whatnow37373 1y agoPeople will start caring when their devices start bricking, loading websites takes 12sec and registering for medicaid is only possible between 9 and 11AM and then only if lucky. We are in this weird twilight zone where everything is still relativity high quality and stuff sort of works but in a few decades shit will start degrading faster than you can say “OpenAI”. Weird thing will start happening like tax systems for the government not being able to be upgraded while consuming billions, infrastructure failing for unknown reasons, simple non or low-power devices that are now ubiquitous will become rare. Everything will require subscriptions and internet access and nothing will work right. You will have to talk to LLMs all day.
- yoyohello13 1y agoI'm convinced the Microsoft Teams team has gone all in on vibe coding. I have never seen so many broken features released in such a short time frame as the last couple months. This is the future as more companies go all in on AI coding.
- herpdyderp 1y agoNothing really new then, just faster enshittification timelines.
- JB_Dev 1y agoNah this is just microsofts quality bar in general. AI will only accelerate the decline.
- chairhairair 1y agoIf the current tech plateaus (but continues to come down in price, as expected) then this is a good prediction. But, then there will be a demand for "all-in-one" reliable mega apps to replace everything else. These apps will usher in the megacorp reality William Gibson described.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago>but continues to come down in price, as expected Is it? AI very much seems to be in market capture mode. And IIRC, very few businesses actually report profits. I can only predict AI models ramping up the cost like crazy once the victor captures the market. Same as every other tech trend in the last 20 years.
- sanderjd 1y agoThis doesn't resonate with me at all. First of all, all the most successful software products have had very high quality. Google search won because it was good and fast. All the successful web browsers work incredibly well. Ditto the big operating systems. The iPhone is an amazing product. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok; whatever else you think, these are not buggy or sluggish products, (especially in their prime). Stripe grew by making a great product. The successful B2B products are also very high quality. I don't have much love for Databricks, but it works well. I have found Okta to be extremely impressive. Notion works really well. (There are some counterexamples: I'm not too impressed by Rippling, for instance.) Where are all these examples of products that have succeeded despite not valuing quality?
- oldandboring 1y agoThanks for calling out Rippling. Pretty poor experience for me as well.
- jajko 1y agoSorry but facebook a "high quality product"? It was a bug infested shitshow from beginning to this day, across multiple computers, spanning more than decade and a half. Not just me. Literally their only value is social graph, which they have by luck of being first, nothing more. These days when site crashes I welcome it as a gentle reminder to not spend there even that 1 minute I sometimes do. Anyway its now mostly fake ai generated ads to obscure groups I have 0 interest in, I keep reporting them to FB but even for outrighr fraud or scams FB comes back to me with resolution in maybe 2% of the cases. EU on you you cheap scammers. But in the past I used it for ie photo sharing with family and friends, since I was super active in adventuring and travelling around the world. Up to 10k photos over a decade. Photo albums uploads randomly failed, or uploaded some subset, some photos twice. On stable fiber optic, while flickr or google photos never ever had such issue. Cannot comment, some internal gibberish error. Comment posted twice. Page reloads to error. Links to profiles or photos go to empty page. Sometimes even main page just empty feed or some internal error. I saw the sentence "Something went wrong" hundreds or maybe even thousands of times, it became such a classic 500 variant. And so on and on, I dont keep list around. Always on Firefox and ublock origin. I would be properly ashamed to be ever profesionally linked with such, by huge margin, worst technical product that I ever came across. That is, if I could somehow ignore what a cancer to society I would be helping to build, but that would require advanced sociopathical mental tricks on myself I am simply neither capable nor willing to do. Nah, FB doesnt deserve to be mentioned in same category as the rest, on any reasonable basis.
- caseysoftware 1y ago> Business has never valued quality. Customers can value quality, but business only values profit margins. If think you're really close with one nuance. Business does not value CODE quality. Their primary goal is to ship product quickly enough that they can close customers. If you're in a fast moving or competitive space, quality matters more because you need to ship differentiating features. If the space is slow moving, not prone to migration, etc, then the shipping schedule can be slower and quality is less important. That said, customers care about "quality" but they likely define it very differently.. primarily as "usability" They don't care about the code behind the scenes, what framework you used, etc as long as the software a) does what they want and b) does it "quick enough" in their opinion.
- kerkeslager 1y ago> They don't care about the code behind the scenes, what framework you used, etc as long as the software a) does what they want and b) does it "quick enough" in their opinion. Business folks love to say this, but a lot of this time this is glossing over a pretty inherent coupling between code quality and doing what users want quick enough. I've worked on a lot of projects with messy code, and that mess always translated into problems which users cared about. There isn't some magical case where the code is bad and the software is great for the users--that's not a thing that exists, at least not for very long.
- EFreethought 1y agoCustomers value quality when quality is available. If someone in the supply chain before you cares more about something being cheap, then that is all you get.
- mattgreenrocks 1y agoA few facts about my favorite quality-centric company: https://www.fractalaudio.com/ https://www.fractalaudio.com/ They build hardware-based amp/pedal modelers (e.g. virtual pedalboards + amp) for guitars that get a very steady stream of updates. From a feel and accuracy perspective, they outcompete pretty much everyone else, even much bigger companies such as Line 6 (part of Yamaha). Pretty small company AFAIK, maybe less than 20 people or so. Most of the improvements stem from the CEO's ever-improving understanding of how to model what are very analog systems accurately. They do almost everything you shouldn't do as a startup: * mostly a hardware company * direct sales instead of going through somewhere like Sweetwater * they don't pay artists to endorse them * no subscriptions * lots of free, sometimes substantial updates to the modeling algorithms * didn't use AI to build their product quickly Quality is how they differentiate themselves in a crowded market. This isn't an edge case, either. This is how parts of the market function. Not every part of every market is trapped in a race to the bottom.
- vinceguidry 1y agoYou love to see it. Nothing beats a labor of love.
- intalentive 1y agoException that proves the rule. If "quality" is a niche, then by definition it doesn't characterize the market.
- mattgreenrocks 1y agoRight. In fact, it doesn't usually characterize an entire market, more often it's just certain segments: sometimes you want McDonalds, sometimes you want a Michelin-starred restaurant. Similarly with the example: lots of guitarists are keen on NAM (Neural Amp Modeler) because it is free and runs on a PC, or one of the cheaper hardware pedals such as the ToneX. The low-end of this market is always chasing the high-end, but these cheaper options are fantastic for the sound quality they can produce and have come a long way from the L6 Pods of years ago.
- mercenario 1y ago> This article makes a fundamental mistake where the author thinks that business values quality. Business has never valued quality. Customers can value quality, but business only values profit margins. If customers will only buy quality, then that's what business will deliver. But customers don't value quality either, most of the time. They value bang-for-buck. Completely agree. > They'll buy the cheapest tools on Amazon and happily vibe code their way into a hole, then throw the broke code out and vibe code some more. Now I completely disagree and it is easy to prove: Apple. I don't need to say anything else.