Comment by farhanhubble
6 months ago
I like the article. In fact just yesterday I quipped to someone about how the quality of AI output will be determined by the competence of its "operators".
I have always had a strong drive to produce awe-inspiring software. At every job I have had, I have strived for usability, aesthetics, performance and reliability. I have maintained million LoC codebases and never caused a major issue, while people around me kept creating more problems than they fixed. However I do not recall one single word of encouragement, let alone praise. I do recall being lectured for being fixated on perfectionism a few times.
I took me 15 years to realize that consumers themselves do not care about quality. Until they do, the minority of engineers who strive for it are gonna waste their efforts.
Yes software is complex. Yes, you cannot compare software engineering to mechanical, electrical engineering or architecture. But do we deserve the absolute shit show that every app, website and device has become?
I don’t think it’s true that “consumers don’t care about quality” but rather that their concern for quality doesn’t really manifest itself in those terms. Consumers care about critical tools being available when they need them and businesses often have a hard time situating feature requests in the broader desire for utility and stability (in part because these are things only noticed when things are really bad).
Part of my growth as a developer was connected with realizing that a lot of the issues with quality resulted from miscommunication between “the business” and engineers advocating for quality.
agree that we (users, humans, customers) all are desperately reaching for something steady, well designed, rugged.
something that people thought about for longer than whatever the deadline they had to work on it. something that radiates the care and human compassion they put into their work.
we all want and need this quality. it is harder to pull off these days for a lot of dumb reasons. i wish we all cared enough to not make it so mysterious, and that we could all rally around it, celebrate it, hold it to high regard.
> I took me 15 years to realize that consumers themselves do not care about quality. Until they do, the minority of engineers who strive for it are gonna waste their efforts.
N=1 but I would personally pay $15 for a higher quality garden hose valve when the competition is <$10, but I typically can't because I have no way of knowing which one of the products marketed at me is the higher quality one. The worst case scenario for me is paying $15 for a bad quality product.
It's not that consumers don't want quality, it's that quality is hard to market.
Consumers don't care about your code, only what it does for them. If your crappy software provides its intended service quickly, accurately, and reliably enough, your customers consider it a win. Any further improvements on those axes are just gravy -- expensive gravy.
No. Consumers don't care about what they get. May be a small minority of tech savvy ones do but others don't or at least they don't know how to demand better software because software comes with no promises and guarantees.
Consumers certainly get annoyed if their software is hard to use, has errors, is slow or down. I've run many user tests with arbitrarily selected test subjects, and this part is universal. This is what good software development can fix, or ideally avoid in the first place.
One kinda heart breaking thing I observed was that especially older users wouldn't get mad at the software, but themselves. They thought everybody else is using this just fine, and they're somehow not smart enough. Motivated me to go that extra mile whenever I can.
>they don't know how to demand better software
This is such a nonsensical statement. Consumers will always find something else if what they're currently using isn't up to what they paid for.
People can only tolerate so much. My current employer just switched from one HR software to another
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Exactly and that's why we're here - against all odds you do your best to make things right - that's THE job.