Comment by caseyy

This is also the exact reason why all the bright-eyed pieces that some technology would increase worker's productivity and therefore allow more leisure time for the worker (20 hour workweek etc) are either hopelessly naive or pure propaganda.

Increased productivity means that the company has a new option to either reduce costs or increase output at no additional cost, one of which it has to do to stay ahead in the rat-race of competitors. Investing the added productivity into employee leisure time would be in the best case foolish and in the worst case suicidal.

You're on the right track, but missing an important aspect.

In most cases the company making the inferior product didn't spend less. But they did spend differently. As in, they spent a lot on marketing.

You were focused on quality, and hoped for viral word of mouth marketing. Your competitors spent the same as you, but half their budget went to marketing. Since people buy what they know, they won.

Back in the day MS made Windows 95. IBM made OS/2. MS spend a billion $ on marketing Windows 95. That's a billion back when a billion was a lot. Just for the launch.

Techies think that Quality leads to sales. If does not. Marketing leads to sales. There literally is no secret to business success other than internalizing that fact.

> What I realized is that lower costs, and therefore lower quality,

This implication is the big question mark. It's often true but it's not at all clear that it's necessarily true. Choosing better languages, frameworks, tools and so on can all help with lowering costs without necessarily lowering quality. I don't think we're anywhere near the bottom of the cost barrel either.

I think the problem is focusing on improving the quality of the end products directly when the quality of the end product for a given cost is downstream of the quality of our tools. We need much better tools.

For instance, why are our languages still obsessed with manipulating pointers and references as a primary mode of operation, just so we can program yet another linked list? Why can't you declare something as a "Set with O(1) insert" and the language or its runtime chooses an implementation? Why isn't direct relational programming more common? I'm not talking programming in verbose SQL, but something more modern with type inference and proper composition, more like LINQ, eg. why can't I do:

    let usEmployees = from x in Employees where x.Country == "US";

    func byFemale(Query<Employees> q) =>
      from x in q where x.Sex == "Female";

    let femaleUsEmployees = byFemale(usEmployees);

These abstract over implementation details that we're constantly fiddling with in our end programs, often for little real benefit. Studies have repeatedly shown that humans can write less than 20 lines of correct code per day, so each of those lines should be as expressive and powerful as possible to drive down costs without sacrificing quality.

> I don’t think this leads to market collapse

You must have read that the Market for Lemons is a type of market failure or collapse. Market failure (in macroeconomics) does not yet mean collapse. It describes a failure to allocate resources in the market such that the overall welfare of the market participants decreases. With this decrease may come a reduction in trade volume. When the trade volume decreases significantly, we call it a market collapse. Usually, some segment of the market that existed ceases to exist (example in a moment).

There is a demand for inferior goods and services, and a demand for superior goods. The demand for superior goods generally increases as the buyer becomes wealthier, and the demand for inferior goods generally increases as the buyer becomes less wealthy.

In this case, wealthier buyers cannot buy the superior relevant software previously available, even if they create demand for it. Therefore, we would say a market fault has developed as the market could not organize resources to meet this demand. Then, the volume of high-quality software sales drops dramatically. That market segment collapses, so you are describing a market collapse.

> There’s probably another name for this

You might be thinking about "regression to normal profits" or a "race to the bottom." The Market for Lemons is an adjacent scenario to both, where a collapse develops due to asymmetric information in the seller's favor. One note about macroecon — there's never just one market force or phenomenon affecting any real situation. It's always a mix of some established and obscure theories.

My wife has a perfume business. She makes really high quality extrait de parfums [1] with expensive materials and great formulations. But the market is flooded with eau de parfums -- which are far more diluted than a extrait -- using cheaper ingredients, selling for about the same price. We've had so many conversations about whether she should dilute everything like the other companies do, but you lose so much of the beauty of the fragrance when you do that. She really doesn't want to go the route of mediocrity, but that does seem to be what the market demands.

[1] https://studiotanais.com/

I had the same realization but with car mechanics. If you drive a beater you want to spend the least possible on maintenance. On the other hand, if the car mechanic cares about cars and their craftsmanship they want to get everything to tip-top shape at high cost. Some other mechanics are trying to scam you and get the most amount of money for the least amount of work. And most people looking for car mechanics want to pay the least amount possible, and don't quite understand if a repair should be expensive or not. This creates a downward pressure on price at the expense of quality and penalizes the mechanics that care about quality.

Exactly. People on HN get angry and confused about low software quality, compute wastefulness, etc, but what's happening is not a moral crisis: the market has simply chosen the trade-off it wants, and industry has adapted to it

If you want to be rewarded for working on quality, you have to find a niche where quality has high economic value. If you want to put effort into quality regardless, that's a very noble thing and many of us take pleasure in doing so, but we shouldn't act surprised when we aren't economically rewarded for it

I actually disagree. I think that people will pay more for higher quality software, but only if they know the software is higher quality.

It's great to say your software is higher quality, but the question I have is whether or not is is higher quality with the same or similar features, and second, whether the better quality is known to the customers.

It's the same way that I will pay hundreds of dollars for Jetbrains tools each year even though ostensibly VS Code has most of the same features, but the quality of the implementation greatly differs.

If a new company made their IDE better than jetbrains though, it'd be hard to get me to fork over money. Free trials and so on can help spread awareness.

It can depend on the application/niche.

I used to write signal processing software for land mobile radios. Those radios were used by emergency services. For the most part, our software was high quality in that it gave good quality audio and rarely had problems. If it did have a problem, it would recover quickly enough that the customer would not notice.

Our radios got a name for reliability: such as feedback from customers about skyscrapers in New York being on fire and the radios not skipping a beat during the emergency response. Word of mouth traveled in a relatively close knit community and the "quality" did win customers.

Oddly we didn't have explicit procedures to maintain that quality. The key in my mind was that we had enough time in the day to address the root cause of bugs, it was a small enough team that we knew what was going into the repository and its effect on the system, and we developed incrementally. A few years later, we got spread thinner onto more products and it didn't work so well.

I kind of see this in action when I'm comparing products on Amazon. When comparing two products on Amazon that are substantially the same, the cheaper one will have way more reviews. I guess this implies that it has captured the majority of the market.

There's an analogy with evolution. In that case, what survives might be the fittest, but it's not the fittest possible. It's the least fit that can possibly win. Anything else represents an energy expenditure that something else can avoid, and thus outcompete.

I had the exact same experience trying to build a startup. The thing that always puzzled me was Apple: they've grown into one of the most profitable companies in the world on the basis of high-quality stuff. How did they pull it off?

This is a really succinct analysis, thanks.

I'm thinking out loud but it seems like there's some other factors at play. There's a lower threshold of quality that needs to happen (the thing needs to work) so there's at least two big factors, functionality and cost. In the extreme, all other things being equal, if two products were presented at the exact same cost but one was of superior quality, the expectation is that the better quality item would win.

There's always the "good, fast, cheap" triangle but with Moore's law (or Wright's law), cheap things get cheaper, things iterate faster and good things get better. Maybe there's an argument that when something provides an order of magnitude quality difference at nominal price difference, that's when disruption happens?

So, if the environment remains stable, then mediocrity wins as the price of superior quality can't justify the added expense. If the environment is growing (exponentially) then, at any given snapshot, mediocrity might win but will eventually be usurped by quality when the price to produce it drops below a critical threshold.

You're laying it out like it's universal, in my experience there are products where people will seek for the cheapest good enough but there are also other product that people know they want quality and are willing to pay more.

Take cars for instance, if all people wanted the cheapest one then Mercedes or even Volkswagen would be out of business.

Same for professional tools and products, you save more by buying quality product.

And then, even in computer and technology. Apple iPhone aren't cheap at all, MacBook come with soldered ram and storage, high price, yet a big part of people are willing to buy that instead of the usual windows bloated spyware laptop that run well enough and is cheap.

If you’re trying to sell a product to the masses, you either need to make it cheap or a fad.

You cannot make a cheap product with high margins and get away with it. Motorola tried with the RAZR. They had about five or six good quarters from it and then within three years of initial launch were hemorrhaging over a billion dollars a year.

You have to make premium products if you want high margins. And premium means you’re going for 10% market share, not dominant market share. And if you guess wrong and a recession happens, you might be fucked.

Yes, I was in this place too when I had a consulting company. We bid on projects with quotes for high quality work and guaranteed delivery within the agreed timeframe. More often than not we got rejected in favor of some students who submitted a quote for 4x less. I sometimes asked those clients how the project went, and they'd say, well, those guys missed the deadline and asked for more money several times

> We were sure that a better product would win people over and lead to viral success. It didn’t. Things grew, but so slowly that we ran out of money after a few years before reaching break even.

Relevant apocrypha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ

These economic forces exist in math too. Almost every mathematician publishes informal proofs. These contain just enough discussion in English (or other human language) to convince a few other mathematicians in the same field that they their idea is valid. But it is possible to make errors. There are other techniques: formal step-by-step proof presentations (e.g. by Leslie Lamport) or computer-checked proofs that would be more reliable. But almost no mathematician uses these.

I feel your realization and still hope my startup will have an competitive edge through quality.

In this case quality also means code quality which in my coding believe should lead to faster feature development

The problem with your thesis is that software isn't a physical good, so quality isn't tangible. If software does the advertised thing, it's good software. That's it.

With physical items, quality prevents deterioration over time. Or at least slows it. Improves function. That sort of thing.

Software just works or doesn't work. So you want to make something that works and iterate as quickly as possible. And yes, cost to produce it matters so you can actually bring it to market.

I'm a layman, but in my opinion building quality software can't really be a differentiator because anyone can build quality software given enough time and resources. You could take two car mechanics and with enough training, time, assistance from professional dev consultants, testing, rework, so and so forth, make a quality piece of software. But you'd have spent $6 million to make a quality alarm clock app.

A differentiator would be having the ability to have a higher than average quality per cost. Then maybe you're onto something.

It depends on who is paying versus using the product. If the buyer is the user, they tend value quality more so than otherwise.

Do you drive the cheapest car, eat the cheapest food, wear the cheapest clothes, etc.?

I see another dynamic "customer value" features get prioritized and eventually product reaches a point of crushing tech debt. It results in "customer value" features delivery velocity grinding to a halt. Obviously subject to other forces but it is not infrequent for someone to come in and disrupt the incumbents at this point.

> People want cheap

There is an exception: luxury goods. Some are expensive, but people don't mind them being overpriced because e.g. they are social status symbols. Is there such a thing like "luxury software"? I think Apple sort of has this reputation.

>lower costs, and therefore lower quality,

Many high-quality open-source designs suggest this is a false premise, and as a developer who writes high-quality and reliable software for much much lower rates than most, cost should not be seen as a reliable indicator of quality.

"Quality is free"[1], luxury isn't.

Also, one should not confuse the quality of the final product and the quality of the process.

[1] https://archive.org/details/qualityisfree00cros

There’s probably another name for this

Capitalism? Marx's core belief was that capitalists would always lean towards paying the absolute lowest price they could for labor and raw materials that would allow them to stay in production. If there's more profit in manufacturing mediocrity at scale than quality at a smaller scale, mediocrity it is.

Not all commerce is capitalistic. If a commercial venture is dedicated to quality, or maximizing value for its customers, or the wellbeing of its employees, then it's not solely driven by the goal of maximizing capital. This is easier for a private than a public company, in part because of a misplaced belief that maximizing shareholder return is the only legally valid business objective. I think it's the corporate equivalent of diabetes.

But do you think you could have started with a bug laden mess? Or is it just the natural progression down the quality and price curve that comes with scale

> People want cheap, so if you sell something people want, someone will make it for less by cutting “costs” (quality).

Sure, but what about the people who consider quality as part of their product evaluation? All else being equal everyone wants it cheaper, but all else isn't equal. When I was looking at smart lighting, I spent 3x as much on Philips Hue as I could have on Ikea bulbs: bought one Ikea bulb, tried it on next to a Hue one, and instantly returned the Ikea one. It was just that much worse. I'd happily pay similar premiums for most consumer products.

But companies keep enshittifying their products. I'm not going to pay significantly more for a product which is going to break after 16 months instead of 12 months. I'm not going to pay extra for some crappy AI cloud blockchain "feature". I'm not going to pay extra to have a gaudy "luxury" brand logo stapled all over it.

Companies are only interested in short-term shareholder value these days, which means selling absolute crap at premium prices. I want to pay extra to get a decent product, but more and more it turns out that I can't.

>There’s probably another name for this, it’s not quite the Market for Lemons idea. I don’t think this leads to market collapse, I think it just leads to stable mediocrity everywhere, and that’s what we have.

It's the same concept as the age old "only an engineer can build a bridge that just barely doesn't fall down" circle jerk but for a more diverse set of goods than just bridges.

Maybe you could compete by developing new and better products? Ford isn't selling the same car with lower and lower costs every year.

It's really hard to reconcile your comment with Silicon Valley, which was built by often expensive innovation, not by cutting costs. Were Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft successful because they cut costs? The AI companies?

I'm proud of you, it often takes people multiple failures before they learn to accept their worldview that regulations aren't necessary and the tragedy of Commons is a myth are wrong.

I’d argue this exists for public companies, but there are many smaller, private businesses where there’s no doctrine of maximising shareholder value

These companies often place a greater emphasis on reputation and legacy Very few and far between, Robert McNeel & Associates (American) is one that comes to mind (Rhino3D), as his the Dutch company Victron (power hardware)

The former especially is not known for maximising their margins, they don’t even offer a subscription-model to their customers

Victron is an interesting case, where they deliberately offer few products, and instead of releasing more, they heavily optimise and update their existing models over many years in everything from documentation to firmware and even new features. They’re a hardware company mostly so very little revenue is from subscriptions

> There’s probably another name for this

Race to the bottom

You are comparing applications with wildly different features and UI. That's neither an argument for nor against performance as an important quality metric.

How fast you can compile, start and execute some particular code matters. The experience of using a program that performs well if you use it daily matters.

Performance is not just a quantitative issue. It leaks into everything, from architecture to delivery to user experience. Bad performance has expensive secondary effects, because we introduce complexity to patch over it like horizontal scaling, caching or eventual consistency. It limits our ability to make things immediately responsive and reliable at the same time.

If you're being honest, compare Slack and Teams not with weechat, but with Telegram. Its desktop client (along with other clients) is written by an actually competent team that cares about performance, and it shows. They have enough money to produce a native client written in C++ that has fantastic performance and is high quality overall, but these software behemoths with budgets higher than most countries' GDP somehow never do.

This; "quality" is such an unclear term here.

In an efficient market people buy things based on a value which in the case of software, is derived from overall fitness for use. "Quality" as a raw performance metric or a bug count metric aren't relevant; the criteria is "how much money does using this product make or save me versus its competition or not using it."

In some cases there's a Market of Lemons / contract / scam / lack of market transparency issue (ie - companies selling defective software with arbitrary lock-ins and long contracts), but overall the slower or more "defective" software is often more fit for purpose than that provided by the competition. If you _must_ have a feature that only a slow piece of software provides, it's still a better deal to acquire that software than to not. Likewise, if software is "janky" and contains minor bugs that don't affect the end results it provides, it will outcompete an alternative which can't produce the same results.

That's true. I meant it in a broader sense. Quality = {speed, function, lack of bugs, ergonomics, ... }.

[dead]

I do think there is an information problem in many cases.

It is easy to get information of features. It is hard to get information on reliability or security.

The result is worsened because vendors compete on features, therefore they all make the same trade off of more features for lower quality.

I used to work at a large company that had a lousy internal system for doing performance evals and self-reviews. The UI was shitty, it was unreliable, it was hard to use, it had security problems, it would go down on the eve of reviews being due, etc. This all stressed me out until someone in management observed, rather pointedly, that the reason for existence of this system is that we are contractually required to have such a system because the rules for government contracts mandate it, and that there was a possibility (and he emphasized the word possibility knowingly) that the managers actully are considering their personal knowledge of your performance rather than this performative documentation when they consider your promotions and comp adjustments. It was like being hit with a zen lightning bolt: this software meets its requirements exactly, and I can stop worrying about it. From that day on I only did the most cursory self-evals and minimal accomplishents, and my career progressed just fine.

You might not think about this as “quality” but it does have the quality of meeting the perverse functional requirements of the situation.

> I had to wonder if anyone writing the checks had ever seen the product

Probably not, and that's like 90% of the issue with enterprise software. Sadly enterprise software products are often sold based mainly on how many boxes they check in the list of features sent to management, not based on the actual quality and usability of the product itself.

What you're describing is Enterprise(tm) software. Some consultancy made tens of millions of dollars building, integrating, and deploying those things. This of course was after they made tens of millions of dollars producing reports exploring how they would build, integrate, and deploy these things and all the various "phases" involved. Then they farmed all the work out to cheap coders overseas and everyone went for golf.

Meanwhile I'm a founder of startup that has gotten from zero to where it is on probably what that consultancy spends every year on catering for meetings.

If they think it is unimportant talk as if it is. It could be more polished. Do we want to impress them or just satisfy their needs?

The job it’s paid to do is satisfy regulation requirements.

Across three jobs, I have now seen three different HR systems from the same supplier which were all differently terrible.

So you're telling me that if companies want to optimize profitability, they’d release inefficient, bug-ridden software with bad UI—forcing customers to pay for support, extended help, and bug fixes?

Suddenly, everything in this crazy world is starting to make sense.

This really focuses on the single metric that can be used try ought lifetime of a product … a really good point that keeps unfolding.

Starting an OSS product - write good docs. Got a few enterprise people interested - “customer success person” is most important marketing you can do …

I’m surprised in your list because it contains 3 apps that I’ve replaced specifically due to performance issues (docker, iterm and notes). I don’t consider myself particularly performance sensitive (at home) either. So it might be true that the world is even _less_ likely to pay for resource efficiency than we think.

Except you’ve already swapped terminal for iterm, and orbstack already exists in part because docker left so much room for improvement, especially on the perf front.

Is this really tolerance and not just monopolistic companies abusing their market position? I mean workers can't even choose what software they're allowed to use, those choices are made by the executive/management class.

IME, the problem is that FOSS consumer facing software is just about the worst in UX and design.

Technically correct, since you know it's bad because it's FOSS.

At least when talking about software that has any real world use case, and not development for developments sake.

In my case I bought it because LG makes appliances that fit under the counter if you don't have much space.

It bothered me the AI BS, but the price was good and the machine works fine.

Reminds me of a "Washing Machine Trategy" by Stanisław Lem. A short story that may be a perfect parabole of the today's AI bubble.

I wouldn't be so sure. People will rename genes to work around Excel bugs.

> The user cannot but a good AI might itself allow the average user to bridge the information asymmetry. So as long as we have a way to select a good AI assistant for ourselves...

In the end it all hinges on the users ability to assess the quality of the product. Otherwise, the user cannot judge whether an assistant recommends quality products and the assistant has an incentive to suggest poorly (e.g. sellout to product producers).

Ha! You're totally right.

There are many exceptions.

1. Sometimes speed = money. Being the first to market, meeting VC-set milestones for additional funding, and not running out of runway are all things cheaper than the alternatives. Software maintenance costs later don't come close to opportunity costs if a company/project fails.

2. Most of the software is disposable. It's made to be sold, and the code repo will be chucked into a .zip on some corporate drive. There is no post-launch support, and the software's performance after launch is irrelevant for the business. They'll never touch the codebase again. There is no "long-term" for maintenance. They may harm their reputation, but that depends on whether their clients can talk with each other. If they have business or govt clients, they don't care.

3. The average tenure in tech companies is under 3 years. Most people involved in software can consider maintenance "someone else's problem." It's like the housing stock is in bad shape in some countries (like the UK) because the average tenure is less than 10 years. There isn't a person in the property's owner history to whom an investment in long-term property maintenance would have yielded any return. So now the property is dilapidated. And this is becoming a real nationwide problem.

4. Capable SWEs cost a lot more money. And if you hire an incapable IC who will attempt to future-proof the software, maintenance costs (and even onboarding costs) can balloon much more than some inefficient KISS code.

5. It only takes 1 bad engineering manager in the whole history of a particular piece of commercial software to ruin its quality, wiping out all previous efforts to maintain it well. If someone buys a second-hand car and smashes it into a tree hours later, was keeping the car pristinely maintained for that moment (by all the previous owners) worth it?

And so forth. What you say is true in some cases (esp where a company and its employees act in good faith) but not in many others.

What does "make in the long-term" even mean? How do you make a sandwich in the long-term?

Bad things are cheaper and easier to make. If they weren't, people would always make good things. You might say "work smarter," but smarter people cost more money. If smarter people didn't cost more money, everyone would always have the smartest people.

"In the long run, we are all dead." -- Keynes

In my experiences, companies can afford to care about good software if they have extreme demands (e.g. military, finance) or amortize over very long timeframes (e.g. privately owned). It's rare for consumer products to fall into either of these categories.

That’s true - but finding good engineers who know how to do it is more expensive, at least in expenditures.

Maybe not, but that still leaves the question of who ends up bearing the actual costs of the bad software.