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mbestoyesterday at 8:23 PM3 repliesview on HN

> obviously created by people the care deeply about the quality of the product they produce

This obviously doesn't represent all of the billions of dollars spent on software like Salesforce, SAP, Realpage, Booking.com, etc. etc. (all notoriously buggy, slow, and complex software). You can't tell me with a straight face that all of the thousands of developers who develop these products/services care deeply about the quality of the product. They get real nice paychecks, benefits and put dinner on the table for their families. That's the market.

> There is no substitute for high quality work.

You're right because there really isn't a consistent definition of what "high quality" software work looks like.


Replies

MrRadaryesterday at 8:34 PM

> This obviously doesn't represent all of the billions of dollars spent on software like Salesforce, SAP, Realpage, Booking.com, etc. etc. (all notoriously buggy, slow, and complex software). You can't tell me with a straight face that all of the thousands of developers who develop these products/services care deeply about the quality of the product. They get real nice paychecks, benefits and put dinner on the table for their families. That's the market.

Those first three are "enterprise" or B2B applications, where the person buying the software is almost never one of the people actually using the software. This disconnect means that the person making the buying decision cannot meaningfully judge the quality of any given piece of software they are evaluating beyond a surface level (where slick demos can paper over huge quality issues) since they do not know how it is actually used or what problems the actual users regularly encounter.

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tkiolp4yesterday at 8:34 PM

SAP, Salesforce, Booking.com… all awful products. We use them because monopolies.

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Terr_yesterday at 9:20 PM

> You can't tell me with a straight face that all of the thousands of developers who develop these products/services care deeply about the quality of the product.

What about caring and being depressed because quality comes from systems rather than (just) individuals?