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Comment by beej71 | Hacker News Reader

On a flight back from overseas recently, I was impressed how the entire process was plagued by bugs the whole way through, from cosmetic to functional. Nothing to do with flight controls, as it should be, but little things like HTML tags printed on my boarding pass, self check-in kiosks failing for me and everyone around me, in-flight entertainment systems needing rebooting...

I figured none of these things stopped me from paying them, so they have no reason to fix them.

But like the PDF with the HTML on it--no one even looked at the output. No developer, no QA, no test users. Or if they did, they didn't care. They just shipped it.

I'd have been embarrassed, but since having a dev fix it would apparently be a net loss to the company, it would have been wrong to do.

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In my line of work I happen to get insight into just how many applications most companies have. Just how many millions of lines of code are floating out there.

And you're right, most companies tier their application importance. "Does the business die if this doesn't work" gets the top tier. "Does it make us money" comes next. Then after that point the amount of oxygen left in the room starts dropping significantly.

And you think "Well, if I was working on that low tier project, I would want to do a good job". And that's the thing, if you start doing good work there, you're going to get yanked off that team and moved up to something more important. You end up with either a dead sea effect on unimportant projects, or so little time for them it cannot possibly be polished.

In Gulliver's travels the hero travels to Laputa, a city where everything is devised by mathematicians and engineers. The hero notices everyone is looking kind of off, which he understands to be because none of their clothing is fitting properly. Instead of measuring everything, they have devised a formula to deduce everything from only one measurement. The implications of this wondrous formula he could already have observed. And everything is like this, nothing really works properly.

Fast forward a few centuries, everything is being automated, and what happens...

>> But like the PDF with the HTML on it--no one even looked at the output. No developer, no QA, no test users. Or if they did, they didn't care. They just shipped it.

Or it was fixed, but not commited

The fix wasn't the right fix, or applied to the right place, because the bug report was bad

The fix worked on the tester's device

It worked, but was broken by another fix

It wasn't checked again after it was 'fixed'

etc

Doesn't your last line belie the rest of your comment? There may well have been similarly embarrassed people who worked on these things, but were either prevented from or simply incentivized not to fix them.

For sure--I mean, the system actually exists this way, and not for no reason.

I _wish_ the quality were better, but I can totally see why "good enough" is king, especially when times are good.

Speaking of airline bugs, something about the spelling of my first name confuses the heck out of Air Canada. For the last 10 years of so, they've been printing my boarding passes with my first name as "Dr. Alexan" instead of "Alexandr". Luckily, it has never caused a problem at the gate so far.

Operations is time-sensitive, and airlines are real-time operations with actual lives at stake.

Introducing bug fixes may ship additional bugs. That's a real risk.

The scale of the system needed to get you and your luggage flying overseas in an economically viable way says a lot about how amazing the current system is. But sure, complain about HTML tags being printed and assume you could do better.

I'm 100% certain if I were writing code to print boarding passes I could have done better.

I appreciate the scale of the system. If your argument is that such a large system cannot be more bug-free than it is, we can just agree to disagree.

But if you're saying it's not worth it financially to fix these bugs, then we can at least agree with that.

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