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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

I would hook on quality is expensive take.

Lots of people write lengthy posts nagging about quality and usually these people work in qa or software dev where they get paid for it and mor quality is more work safety for them.

But no one wants really put their own money. Where fixing even trivial bug is 1h of work because someone has to write requirements, someone has to code it, someone has to check if it works and did not break something else.

1 hour on b2b market is $70 or $100 - no one is going to pay that to fix small issue.

I drive 10 year old car it has some issues and if I would go to car mechanic it would be $50 an hour - even if it would take 1 hour to fix all I am not willing to pay for that.

No one wants to pay for 100% quality.

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Yeah sure, really expensive until the accumulated tech debt prevents any productive work from being done. Correct a typo? Sorry boss, takes at least 1 year, shit hits the fan when you change labels like that (the truth). How much is your salary? Oh ok... let's not do that then.

Managers throw more people at the problem to improve productivity, only for the new people to need training. Okay, let's have the new people develop everything from scratch. Wow, that's fast... initially, but they throw code quality out of the window to reach feature parity asap, crippling productivity in the process again. Rinse and repeat.

Or, or... give people the time to improve things. Nobody wants to pay for quality in software until they realize how much it costs them to neglect quality. Unfortunately, some people never realize, cut their losses after a dozen rewrites, and launch the current half-assed iteration. No, it didn't work out for them.

Then they drop project and start new one. Software is not endangered species to protect it by all means.

When I am done with my car I just get a new one.

Yes there are software projects that need high quality but it is not 90% of cases.

I think cars are a poor example. Cheaping out on quality can cost companies 6 years of 12 developers' salaries, market share, reputation, customers and bankruptcy procedures instead of... 3 years of 9 developers' salaries.

I've seen it firsthand: Major update to our only software product. Years of work. Everything is moving too slow. Managers hire more people. Performance tanks due to training the new folks. Our publicly available software is abandonware, all hands on the major update to get it done. A few customers switch to competitors, but hype is high for the new update.

After 5 total rewrites, they cut their losses and launch the half-baked current iteration. Launch feels earth shatteringly disappointing and insulting to all stakeholders, even including the developers of the major update. Developers receive death threats. Many developers leave the company. Remaining customers flee to competitors.

Lessons learned: Don't cheap out on quality. It can quite literally cost you your company. Nobody needs absolute quality, and that's impossible to achieve, but at least try to care about quality.

Here we are throwing arguments.

I don’t write about no quality. I write about reasonable level of quality.

I argue against “everything has to be perfect”.

Yes, but it's not that simple. There are millions of users of fancy/big tech who would without thinking pay even hundreds of dollars to crowdsource some quality-of-life change for things they use. (Think Windows, Android, GMail, WhatsApp, AWS self-service UI, Amazon.com, Epic, EMR systems, other large systems.)

But there's no market for this. And even then in many (likely most) cases the perceived user-facing quality is just irrelevant. There's no effective advocate for this.

Worse is that no one wants to pay to keep the domain knowledge alive. The project finishes, the team disbands which makes maintenance cost more.

If “quality” prevents you from going out and laying claim to a big chunk of a greenfield market because you move slower than lower-“quality” competitors, then “quality” will cost you very dearly indeed.

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