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Comment by s1k3s | Hacker News Reader

As a software agency owner I can tell you that barely anyone wants that. We maybe get 1-2 requests for quality software every year. Most of our clients want their apps built as fast as possible, with little to no consideration about the tech quality. We have the choice of doing it that way or going out of business.

This also affects our people (usually our top engineers) - which is why I want to start developing our own products this year.

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I can relate. So often the people in charge doesn’t care at all about software quality. They want things as fast as possible in order to make money out of it. Software is just a mean to an end. So rarely an end by itself … Try to build a car or anything half as fast … control quality will suffer but with software it’s way easier to ship fast

Ding, ding, ding!

Cover your ass, ticking off items as launched are other areas that lead to speed over quality every time.

The OP post reads as very naive, without experience in the real world corporate politics. No one really gives a shit about most things on that list (unfortunately).

Even with own products it often is an issue; after years of working on something complex, you want or need to launch it. But it might still be quite bad compared to your vision of it; you simply run out of time, steam, money etc and launch it. Tests succeed and with ok coverage, you even have some tla+ and coq covered parts, but, because you have to be somewhat practical you stopped proving things (or even just dropping some less uphill practices) years ago.

Yeah, then when the half baked thing you've rushed out falls over it's your fault. Despite the customer asking for exactly that level of quality. When bugs appear it because the engineer is an idiot not that they wanted to write tests but no one wants to pay for them. Agency work is tough. Being an in house dev is much better IMHO.

It's the same for most industries. I constantly see comments from construction workers "Every building I worked on was rushed and absolute crap, I wouldn't be surprised if they collapsed in a year" and yet they almost never do.

>It's the same for most industries. I constantly see comments from construction workers "Every building I worked on was rushed and absolute crap, I wouldn't be surprised if they collapsed in a year" and yet they almost never do.

Its because they are engineered with a margin of safety and then inspected for obvious issues. But yeah throw them together is the name of the game. Faster = more money.

Take the aftermath of the recent Kahramanmaras earthquake, the status quo should be improved even for well established engineering fields, and more so for the software industry.

Same here. Some projects I work on:

- please put this broken crap of 15 services written in 6 different programming languages on a 50 node cluster so we can read and write data with 300 kbit/s.

2 years later:

- could you do something about this cluster, it costs us too much.

Some companies may not have even existed 2 years later if they spent the money and time earlier to optimize.

We are talking about 10+ years old companies. I quite often save significant amount of money for such companies which could have been saved from the beginning by not doing something completely silly.

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