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Comment by ryanmarsh | Hacker News Reader

Most involved data conversion and software bugs.

I tried to book a haircut using my barber’s new online reservation thing. Of course it was all fucked up.

Everything’s fucked up and no one cares. I wonder what it will take to change the mentality around quality/testing in these companies.

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Most businesses just don't seem to respect good/working tech. Even though it's often critical to their bottom line, they'll think "$5,000?! My idiot nephew could do it for $100. Those coder monkeys think what they do is soooo hard as to charge $5,000?? Ha! Look, this guy here says he can do it for $250." <1 year later> "I hate tech and every techie. They think they're god's gift to humanity. My system never works. I paid good money for it" ($250). I think the corporate equivalent to that is, "It costs what?! Outsource it overseas right now!"

I don’t believe this is exactly right: the major problem is most businesses can’t distinguish which techies are worth $250 or $5,000 up front. So they make the choice of going cheap and hoping it works out. Some of the few do go the premium route, and still end up in a project failure or overrun. So can you fault them?

You're right, but I think the general disdain for tech/techies is upstream of their inability to distinguish. Though it's a huge, huge problem trying to identify who/what is worth it and who/what isn't.

Marriott did outsource their development of the migrated SPG+MI marriott.com.

and then there's the "consulting" firms that will charge you the premium 5000 then turn around and outsource for 250.

...or for $150.

Yeah my barber has a shitty online reservation thing too. In that case, it’s that their JavaScript nonsense craps out if it can’t load Facebook. Since I block things like third party Facebook scripts, it never loads. I can manually use the JavaScript console to get past it and it works fine.

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