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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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

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