Hacker News Reader

Comment by _jezell_ | Hacker News Reader

It's cheaper to develop high quality software, so let's all pay $500k+ a year to hire people capable of doing it for us, find a recruiting team good enough to find them, build a culture they actually want to join, and then hire enough of them that they have time to do regular code reviews, write tests, refactor code, etc.

High quality software takes a lot more than management telling everyone it's ok if they want to write high quality code.

View on HN

False dichotomy. You don't need $500k engineers to write quality software. $150k/yr ones will do it just fine if you teach them how to do it and part ways with those who don't see the value in following basic quality standards.

I assume you need more than one dev to deliver the kind of project OP is thinking of, so that 500k is for a dev team

Pretty sure the OP meant that only $500K+ per head FANG employees are capable of writing quality software. To be fair, you can't write any other software at FNG (don't know about A): you won't be allowed to check it in. Some people leave due to not being able to pass the readability review. But FANG employment is not a prerequisite. I have personally hired something like 20 engineers of varying seniority and within a month or two, they were cranking out impeccable work.

When Cleanroom did it, it was anywhere from a little cheaper to a little more expensive. Praxis's process had lower defects with higher, upfront costs. The one quote I heard on price was about 50% more than other suppliers. Praxis and some Cleanroom suppliers issued warranties for their code at specific defect rates. So, I imagine it's not as hard as you suggest to have high quality software. Heck, I think companies saying their stuff is higher quality could get away with less quality than those warrantied products given current state of software market.

http://infohost.nmt.edu/~al/cseet-paper.html

http://www.anthonyhall.org/c_by_c_secure_system.pdf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com