Comment by glitchc
1 day ago
Okay I'll bite: How does one find these organizations? They all have high quality listed in marketing blurbs on their websites. No one actually claims their product is crap and quality doesn't matter.
1 day ago
Okay I'll bite: How does one find these organizations? They all have high quality listed in marketing blurbs on their websites. No one actually claims their product is crap and quality doesn't matter.
IME, here are some signals that a company actually values correctness. This is not all-inclusive, nor is any one of them a guarantee.
* Their codebase is written in something relatively obscure, like Elixir or Haskell.
* They're an infrastructure [0] or monitoring provider.
* They're running their code on VMs, and have a sane instantiation and deployment process.
* They use Foreign Key Constraints in their RDBMS, and can explain and defend their chosen normalization level.
* They're running their own servers in a colo or self-owned datacenter.
And here are some anti-signals. Same disclaimers apply.
* Their backend is written in JS / TS (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Python [1]).
* They're running on K8s with a bunch of CRDs.
* They've posted blog articles about how they solved problems that the industry solved 20 years ago.
* They exclusively or nearly exclusively use NoSQL [2].
0: This is hit or miss; reference the steady decline in uptime from AWS, GitHub, et al.
1: I love Python dearly, and while it can be made excellent, it's a lot easier to make it bad.
2: Modulo places that have a clear need for something like Scylla - use the the right tool for the job, but the right tool is almost never a DocumentDB.
Look at what they do instead, not their marketing. NASA is the obvious and biggest example. They won't be vibe coding and skipping QA any time soon. Probably ever.
Look at any high quality open source software, and the care people put into them. Those are organizations, made up of people, some of them highly technical.
Startups often don't optimize for correctedness. They can't afford it. But that's a niche. Funny enough, it's the one that's being most affected by the shift in value dynamics right now, so I understand that some people here might see the world as just this, but it isn't.