[anal_reactor]

> You cannot just ignore natural laws and assume, because you 'know better', your software will 'be better'. And whether we like it or not, all software follows a philosophically natural law, which has evolved over decades of human attention. Ignoring these natural laws (...) is only gonna get you butt-hurt, kiddo.

If only you could just read these words back to yourself. Designing perfect software is NOT the case 90% of the time. 90% of the time the entire purpose of software is to facilitate business so if business says "prioritize speed over quality" then you shut up and do exactly that.

Imagine owning a bakery and telling the employee "we need more donuts faster, stop spending ages decorating every single donut like god damn Picasso, just do whatever and move onto the next one, customers are waiting" but instead the guy goes on a rant that nooooooooo only the perfect donuts should be sold, if the glazing isn't perfectly distributed it ruins the flavor profile, which is a real disgrace to the art of making donuts... bro this fast food, stfu and make the donuts faster, we have ten H-1B Donut Artists waiting if you don't like your role.

[aa-jv]

Its an utter fallacy to state that you have to stop doing quality processes if you want to deliver software, rapidly.

Abandoning quality review steps only seems to be 'more efficient' if you're utterly crap at doing quality processes in the first place - but, the more you do them, the better you get at it, faster - so really you're just saying "people who are crap at doing quality-control processes on their software don't want to have to get better at doing quality-control processes, because it just slows them down" .. effectively ignoring the time wasted in bug triage and other user-unfriendly experiences that result from this lack of quality process, down the line...

So I don't buy your argument. I think you might just be crap at software quality processes and don't want to be reminded of it. Maybe you make donuts - some of us actually serve healthy software to our users.

And many of us do it just as quickly as the guy throwing pieces away that he doesn't know how to use, effectively. Albeit, with much higher quality results, naturally.

[anal_reactor]

> effectively ignoring the time wasted in bug triage and other user-unfriendly experiences that result from this lack of quality process, down the line...

The problem is you circled back to valuing user experience itself, while MONEY(UX) looks like a sigmoid, not linear. As long as the UX isn't so horribly broken that most of your customers walk away, it's stupid to spend resources improving UX because you'll get marginal gains at best.

The largest airline in EU is Ryanair. You book it because it's the cheapest. The flight is delayed so you're late for the train, the seats are uncomfortable, customer support doesn't exist, you get constantly bombarded with ads, your day is ruined. You hate it but what are you doing to do next time you fly? Book Ryanair because it's the cheapest. You know it, they know it, your mom knows it.

[aa-jv]

You're describing the race to the bottom which comes from an industry-wide habit of establishing low standards and sticking them to the user, and really all you are doing is justifying why its okay that software sucks - not explaining how to improve it.

We can justify sucky software until the cows come home, and many choose to do so in lieu of actually becoming better engineers.

>stupid to spend resources improving UX because you'll get marginal gains at best.

This is just not true - at best, you'll get far greater gains than you imagine.

I know plenty of counter examples to your Ryanair straw man. People don't have a choice when it comes to finding an ultra-cheap Ryanair-like experience, other than to pay a little extra and have a better experience with other airlines - which tens of thousands of Europeans actually do, every single day. Ryanair isn't transporting everyone, after all. They are the cheapest, and worst of all airlines to choose from.

Sure, you can write crap software, and you'll get some customers, even still.

But, after you write the initial round of crap software, if you make the effort to write better software you will get far, far more customers. Seen it happen a hundred times over 40+ years of professional software development experience, personally, in a variety of markets (consumer and pro/industrial).

Cheap works for onboarding and startups, but it won't sustain the business. People have a very low tolerance for cheaply/poorly built things, after all...

[anal_reactor]

> I know plenty of counter examples to your Ryanair straw man

Then name them lol

I think you simply don't understand how many poor people there are and how much money can be earned by simply offering the cheapest product. People are not going to buy your premium software if they don't have money for luxury products, simple as that.

[MomsAVoxell]

You act as if Ryanair is the only flight service in town.

The counter example is Lufthansa. Plenty of people prefer it because the service is better and it represents better value for money.

[anal_reactor]

Wouldn't you look at, Lufthansa also heavily invests in low-cost brands like Eurowings.