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Comment by sigfubar | Hacker News Reader

I’m glad to see my countrymen branch out into blogging in English so that the rest of the world can have a great big dollop of Russian fatalism.

More to the point: everything’s well and truly fucked, yes, but surely more education cannot form the skeleton of a solution when the masses we’re supposed to educate don’t actually want to learn anything. IMHO, the very incentives of business need to be changed as they’re the foundation of every bad decision that manifests as software bugs. Is this not a version of Conway’s law? “All bad software reflects the lopsided incentives of the ambient business environment.” Call it the universal law of fubarness.

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> IMHO, the very incentives of business need to be changed as they’re the foundation of every bad decision that manifests as software bugs.

Yup. What's worse is how many of our own peers fall back on justifying all this crappy software with "businesses are for making money" without a single dose of irony. It was a bit depressing, reading the comments on HN on the other post and realizing how few people seem to actually care about writing good software.

> the masses we’re supposed to educate don’t actually want to learn anything

Indeed.

What is good software is at least partially subjective. Every measure of quality from the existence of bugs (that is, how many and how severe) to structure (is it OO or functional or a mix) to utility (is it spyware or a command line utility or something else) involves some subjectivity.

Almost everything involves some subjectivity. Business decisions included. Delivering crap product with faster feature turnover is a subjective decision too, you're only guessing if it pans out or not compared to doing it better but a little slower. Someone will say, "I have A/B tests that show". But I'm willing to bet than it most cases, A/B tests will show you whatever you want to see in them, as most people don't have necessary statistical background to correctly run or interpret them (and page optimization companies sometimes actually exploit this against their own customers).

Ugh, I'm living through this right now on an app I've been working on in my company for 3 years. Someone will create a user survey that gets a 5% response rate and use it to justify/rationalize some decision. They think that since they ran the survey they now have data that is good enough to base a decision, with zero desire to statistically validate whether that data is any good or not.

I can't remember which thread this came from, but this talk was posted here somewhere on HN recently and I found it pretty interesting and relevant to this sort of thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGGGDpb04Yc

Hey there, fellow fatalist! My economical-ish education disagrees with you on some points made)

If "good software", whatever it is, is not economically viable, I would gladly walk away feeling good about the future and open a beach bar instead. Currently it seems that faulty design and code are actively harming the businesses. I personally need to make more research around here — what's the connection between, say, conditional spaghetti and anything important? We should at least start talking about these implications. No code is an aisle)

Same goes for "the masses don’t actually want to learn anything" — I see many people getting into web dev right now, and we've made it unreasonably hard to do — why do simple (as in, the ones you can make after a bootcamp) web pages look and work so poor? Word documents from people with a week of training look pretty reasonable.

> Currently it seems that faulty design and code are actively harming the businesses.

So long as a human exists to work around the faulty code, the harm to businesses is minimal. For example, many companies sell feature-full, but absurdly slow and buggy, software to other businesses. The customers aren't going anywhere, and they've protected their niches with a minefield of patents.

So, the features hook the execs, and the end-users work around the bugs and slowness, the business sees no blowback from this.

My favorite anecdote was a front end engineer claiming "I went in and profiled our code and made an action go from 5 seconds to under a tenth of a second!" To which I can only go "Wait, there was a user-space action that took 5 seconds?!"

> My favorite anecdote was a front end engineer claiming "I went in and profiled our code and made an action go from 5 seconds to under a tenth of a second!" To which I can only go "Wait, there was a user-space action that took 5 seconds?!"

And I'm guessing there was, and you didn't notice it (or stopped noticing it at some point), because that's what people do. They get used to this nonsense. Especially if they have no power to improve it.

I'm actually pragmatic about it) 5 seconds is fast enough for an infrequent or complex action — it's not a week, come on! You might as well throw the feature away in a month.

If it turns out the action is more useful than originally planned, you should take time to optimize it.

I don't know how things are back home, but here in the US "getting into web dev" is something people do mostly as a way to increase their earnings. Yes, there are some gems in the crowd, but the base case, so to speak, is someone who simply wants to make more money. These are the people who want to make the jump from $25k/year to $75k/year and stay there, rather than become masters of a craft. Any learning for them is incidental to the economic process, and such worker bees - productive as they may be - don't actually improve the state of our industry.

Good software is exactly economically viable, but it takes upfront investment. Unfortunately, businesses don't like to make that upfront investment in something they don't - yet! - understand. Think of a car: a young person might treat their first car like crap assuming that it would simply run forever like magic. This attitude does a quick 180 the day the car's tranny drops out. I'm thinking that not enough software "transmissions" have quit in order to instill these lessons within the MBA-s of the world.

Well, we're all in it for the money to a certain extent) And statistically, the more people come here, the more bright people among them. Not in finance, not in civil aviation, but here in software — isn't that great?

The supply / demand gap on programmers should close once — our job is not inherently bad or risky. I feel that we just don't know how to train new programmers on this scale yet.

Side track, since there seem to be some russians here. Do you have any good tech blogs in russian I should follow? (thoughtspile thank you for your recommendation of Nikita Prokopov)

I casually browse https://habr.com/ as a symptom of my tendency to tail aggregators a-la HN/lobste.rs rather than individual blogs.

Habr has some poor-quality translations, often without proper attribution, which is why I don't like it. Some corporate blogs can be nice, though.

(I don't know why we're doing it in English) For the more general tech (physics and stuff) — https://sly2m.livejournal.com/ https://sly2m.livejournal.com/tag/%D0%BD%D0%B0%20%D0%BF%D0%B... series especially recommended

For programming, I enjoy https://igoradamenko.com/blog/ These seem mostly dead, but might come back: - https://medium.com/@kovchiy - https://medium.com/@xanf Here's a guy working on V8 who ocassinally posts / talks in Russian: https://mrale.ph/talks/

Cheers)

(as for in english, i've rarely seen people talk in other languages, i thought maybe there was a rule)

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