[coldtea]

>I have a funny feeling that the nontechnical people on my current project would be nodding their heads along to the article, but the truth is that our applications have bugs that 100% of our customers are running into; they simply aren't immediately noticeable to a layperson. That doesn't mean they're not important.

If they're not noticeable, and the customers keep buying, despite 100% of them having them, how are they "important"?

>The business relies on complying with the rules of third-party organizations and the software is blatantly violating those rules right now.

That's a business decision. It could even be illegal (but still not big of a deal depending on circumstances) but not a bug.

[nowayjose2]

The bugs will be very noticeable to stakeholders who are not end users, if they decide to look. The users don't buy the software because they want to; they buy it because they are required to. If groups we're supposed to be accountable to see the shenanigans we're up to and say, sorry no dice, you have to try again with some other company that made their software properly, _then_ the users will be upset because they'll be out mucho dinero for nothing. The end users don't know what rules we're supposed to be following on our end, nor should they have to.

Where I come from, if software doesn't meet requirements and instead produces incorrect results, it's considered a bug. To use another example from a different company I've worked for, I once found out that the financial reports generated by a particular piece of software were all completely wrong due to errors in the way calculations were done. I pointed this out to the higher-ups and they agreed that there was a bug and that all the existing financial reports were in significant error. They refused to let me fix it, not because we didn't have time (there was plenty, and I was otherwise free to work on pretty much whatever was in the backlog), but because fixing the bug would let the customers know that there was a bug in the first place. Some of this data would end up getting passed on to shareholders and the government. Is this not a bug? In the current case, the reason we're not complying with the rules was because of a bad architectural decision that wasn't properly cleared with anyone before it was implemented.

I guess I'm just not on board with the "just following orders" school of software development when the negligence involved rises to the level of illegality and scams. I'm happy to write a lot of software that I personally think is wonky or strange, but for me it stops when we start ripping people off and breaking the law.

[coldtea]

>They refused to let me fix it, not because we didn't have time (there was plenty, and I was otherwise free to work on pretty much whatever was in the backlog), but because fixing the bug would let the customers know that there was a bug in the first place. Some of this data would end up getting passed on to shareholders and the government. Is this not a bug?

No, it's an opportunity to ask for a large sum of money, to leave the company and not talk about it.