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Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

Um, how long have you been in the industry?

Software has always sucked and had these issues. It has nothing to to with automated QA. The reason you see more issues is 'way back in the day' your software had a very limited number of things that it did, and in general it did not involve accessing a network or chugging down massive volumes of data from untrusted sources.

I work for a company that has a lot of individuals that test for QA issues, they have list miles long of things to check and write reports on.

The problem is more of "It's much easier to write mountains of code than it is to ensure that it works in all cases"

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I worked for almost 15 years in embedded and have 25YOE, and no, software has not always sucked as much as it does now.

I agree with your last point a lot, though I would modify it slightly: it's much easier to write mountains of code now than it as, and it's now common and much easier to import external dependencies (especially at system level) than ever, and those dependencies have tens of millions of lines of mediocre code all by themselves.

The one thing that has changed is updates can be delivered easily. This takes some of the pressure off in terms of QA because rolling out a fix to a centralised service delivered through the browser is quick and painless. The cost of pressing millions of CD's kept developers in check in the past.

That's really not the only thing that changed.

Games are also massively more complicated today. It's one thing for three people getting a 2.5 MB single player DOS game reasonably bug free. It's an entirely different thing to get the 5 GB game made by a team of 100 or 1,000 people.

Most of the size difference is assets anyway, right? Games today use off the shelf engines. It should be alot easier to make rubust games when most of the techincally hard parts are allready done.

And, as you’ve alluded to, the scope of what software does for us on a daily basis has expanded by several orders of magnitude. Not only have a number of devices that used to be purely electro-mechanical been reworked to use microcontrollers (cars, everything in the kitchen), but the scope of activities that have migrated onto the web or our phones is truly massive.

30 years ago, software bugs might interfere with you professionally, but they wouldn’t stop your ability to get money from the bank, cook food, or do any other day to day tasks.

> Not only have a number of devices that used to be purely electro-mechanical been reworked to use microcontrollers (cars, everything in the kitchen),

Yup, and in most cases this not only did not improve them, but made them less useful and more fragile. Let's be honest: the software is there only because it can save on manufacturing costs, and sometimes can be used for extra marketing benefit. No attention is being given to providing value to the customer.

I have to disagree in the case of car engines. When I was a kid my dad and uncles spent hours each month fixing minor problems with their purely electro-mechanical cars. I don't miss carburetors or mechanical ignition timing one bit. Electronically controlled engine functions are much better both in terms of efficiency and consistency.

That's true. I don't have that much experience with car repair so I might be wrong in perceiving the 90s and the 2000s models as the optimum in terms of car reliability - the stuff mostly works without funky issues, parts are cheap, repairs can be made by anyone who spent some time with a wrench, and you don't have to visit a shop with a license for poking around car's computer over every minor issue. That is to say: advances in computer control don't have to go hand in hand with making the cars expensive to service and not end-user repairable. But they do, because greed.

Depends on what you’re talking about.

Car engines are vastly improved in both reliability, cleanliness, and efficiency by the introduction of computers into them. You might not like that when it goes wrong, but we all appreciate not breathing in pre-computerized car engine exhaust.

And that’s the rub. While shoddily written software shoehorned into cheap consumer goods obviously degrades the experience, there are tons of places where well written software has massively improved the quality of the goods that they’re added into. Objectively car engines are just better for the addition of software both in design and in operation. They’re smaller, more powerful, more reliable, cleaner burning, and more efficient than they were before we computerized them.

Yes but at the same time the auto makers let another team make Electron apps for the dashboard. Engine ECUs are nice and decoupled. Maybe the hard realtime requirements is what saves them and keep all the novell crap out?

And that’s why this is hard. There are cases where software drastically improves the objective quality of things (car engines), cases where well done software makes items significantly more enjoyable (some car infotainment), and cases where software makes things worse (everything in the kitchen). Separating them out is hard.

> Software has always sucked and had these issues.

I disagree, subjectively it had its ups and downs and we are in a down phase right now. YMMV.

Software has never been better; there are just more users to please.

And despite the issues lamented in this think piece, it is _Apple_ that the author should blame for setting technology expectations impossibly high.

No organization had been remotely as successful in understanding and releasing tech products that were truly great.

Everything since is just a comparison to expectations Apple set. Even when Apple fails, it is in comparison with an Apple that does not.

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