Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by falcolas 2339 days ago
It's more insidious than that, IMO. We've created a culture where severe bugs impacting your customers are OK, even expected. Developers don't try very hard to preemptively stomp bugs, because there's no pressure for doing so.

I'm a bit old fashioned in this regard, but I'd prefer that we didn't accept that "bugs in production happen" as normal and instead treat the bugs as a failure of process.
1 comments
crdoconnor 2339 days ago
IME that culture, where it exists, varies from organisation to organisation and is driven from the top.

I think a lot of companies don't care about bugs as much as their developers do though, and that isn't necessarily irrational behaviour.

Some kinds of customer facing bugs really are ok to just let happen.

link
falcolas 2339 days ago
> Some kinds of customer facing bugs really are ok to just let happen.

That's the exact mindset of the culture I mentioned. You can justify any kind of bug hitting production with it. It does the exact opposite of pushing things towards a better state; it aims for mediocrity.

Even if striving for zero bugs in production is functionally impossible, it encourages developers (and the entire company) to move towards quality, not away from it. Striving for 100% is what drives change.

link
crdoconnor 2339 days ago
Correct, it aims for mediocrity. If the customer requested 50 McDonald's hamburger, is it a cultural problem that you're not delivering one steak?
link
falcolas 2339 days ago
It's funny that you mention a McDonald's hamburger, since there's actually a lot of standards that their hamburger has to live up to. They have just simplified the creation of a hamburger to the point where teenagers can make them properly with minimal supervision.

Software development is not at that point. Sometimes we put three pickles on instead of two. Sometimes we forget the pickles. Sometimes we spread ketchup all over the outside of the bun. Sometimes we forget to cook the meat. And we don't aim for a good hamburger, we just aim to get something remotely hamburger shaped out the door to the customer.

link
crdoconnor 2339 days ago
The point, however, is that the customer/regulator dictates quality standards, not the person assembling the burger.

Whereas apparently many software engineers do not take their cue from customers since they strive for some impossible "no bug policy" (or some other such rubbish).

link