I feel like no one has said the elephant in the room.
QA teams were fired/never hired in the first place (put onto the Devs/support/customer to report and test)
Management want features and selling not Lovability and polish. We are just hitting an all time of make make make.
jofzar
My running joke for the last couple years is "Nobody knows how to write software anymore" (even about a bug in my code). The problem is almost certainly complexity. Apps are like a house of cards, and we keep adding to the stack with new features, external dependencies, etc. My apps 30 years ago used one language, one library, one process, one thread and shipped on one platform. Now it uses Java, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, SQL and has a dozen linked libraries, talks to a couple servers, has dozens of threads, and runs on desktop, browser, tablet, phone and car console. It's a wonder anything works at all.
jeffreportmill1
It's very simple; If you work 10x faster, you need to release 1/10th the bugs as before for the user's experience to have the same level of bugginess. And we're not incentivized for this; we're still exploring how to ship 10x faster and not exploring how to meet our users' needs 10x better (often conflating the two!)
And I mean, go tell your leadership "Those projects that used to take us a full quarter? Now we can do them in 6 weeks." You don't get the rest of the quarter to stabilize your codebase. Now you jam 2 releases into the quarter.
jakevoytko
I thought about writing a comedy, set in the far future, where everything looks beautiful but nothing works right and it's just accepted (almost unnoticed) as a running gag throughout the film. Now I wonder how prescient that would be.
david927
I think software has always been terribly buggy. Back in the day, things would crash (including your entire OS in many cases) all the time. These days, it's more often smaller, stupid UX issues, but that's been the situation for a few years. I've seen no difference over the past six months.
lkbm
I haven't notice any significant changes.
My Linux experience gets more polished every year. Last serious issue I remember is a AMD GPU kernel crash around 2022(?).
I feel like Android has always had its glitches. I can live with the current set, but each update has me nervous about the new set of bugs that will appear.
wmedrano
I mostly feel this on Microsoft stuff. O365 browser stuff was always buggy, but last month I had to fight to zoom in on something in PowerPoint. Pagination in Azure ML randomly broke, it took them a month to fix it.
Atlassian is also a bug factory, but I did not expect anything better of them. Each UI update they did to Confluence and Jira just made everything more confusing in the last 10 years.
laci37
Software quality, i.e lack of bugs, from the average user's perspective, is a hygiene factor. High quality does not get rewarded, and the instant it crosses below the threshold of "good enough", users will punish you.
The eternal question for management seems to be "what can we get away with?".
A dev with quality problems in their output? Can em'.
A dev with exceptional quality in their output? Can em'.
A dev with just the right corners cut? Keep 'em, but no raise.
Is this regime right or fair? I don't think so, but it is the incentives that drive all of this.
I believe the only solution to this, at least in the for-profit software world, is to try to convince everyone to pay for quality. If the money is there, then maybe management will reward devs who care about quality user experiences.
mayhemducks
There has been a steady decline for decades. Release early, release often. One example: Apple used to have a thing called Gold Master release when updating software was not as immediate. The GM programs met a high bar for quality. Not so much anymore… the attitude is we can just release a new version later this week. There also used to be a thing called backwards compatibility… now no one thinks twice about breaking code on older platforms.
waynecochran
I feel it in two ways.
I've been using windows for the past 5 years or so. I was using Linux before that. I used to complain about things breaking in Linux but the situation in Windows is way worse than it ever was in Linux. A couple of days ago my co-worker turned on his computer and windows has locked him out somehow. He had to disable secure boot, recover his bitlocker passphrase from his microsoft account, and only then could he get past the boot screen. The theory is that his laptop turned off while updating. I'm thinking, why doesn't the update abort when it realizes it's not plugged in or on low battery. He said it had never happened to him before and I have also never seen it.
The other side I notice is with google products. Barring android, GCP, and the less than yearly occassional outage, I would never see a bug in google products. Now I notice them often in drive, sheets, gmail, and specially meet. The other day I joined a meeting and all participants couldn't log in. NEVER have I seen such a bad production bug from google.
comments (10)
QA teams were fired/never hired in the first place (put onto the Devs/support/customer to report and test)
Management want features and selling not Lovability and polish. We are just hitting an all time of make make make.
jofzar
jeffreportmill1
And I mean, go tell your leadership "Those projects that used to take us a full quarter? Now we can do them in 6 weeks." You don't get the rest of the quarter to stabilize your codebase. Now you jam 2 releases into the quarter.
jakevoytko
david927
lkbm
My Linux experience gets more polished every year. Last serious issue I remember is a AMD GPU kernel crash around 2022(?).
I feel like Android has always had its glitches. I can live with the current set, but each update has me nervous about the new set of bugs that will appear.
wmedrano
Atlassian is also a bug factory, but I did not expect anything better of them. Each UI update they did to Confluence and Jira just made everything more confusing in the last 10 years.
laci37
The eternal question for management seems to be "what can we get away with?".
A dev with quality problems in their output? Can em'. A dev with exceptional quality in their output? Can em'. A dev with just the right corners cut? Keep 'em, but no raise.
Is this regime right or fair? I don't think so, but it is the incentives that drive all of this.
I believe the only solution to this, at least in the for-profit software world, is to try to convince everyone to pay for quality. If the money is there, then maybe management will reward devs who care about quality user experiences.
mayhemducks
waynecochran
I've been using windows for the past 5 years or so. I was using Linux before that. I used to complain about things breaking in Linux but the situation in Windows is way worse than it ever was in Linux. A couple of days ago my co-worker turned on his computer and windows has locked him out somehow. He had to disable secure boot, recover his bitlocker passphrase from his microsoft account, and only then could he get past the boot screen. The theory is that his laptop turned off while updating. I'm thinking, why doesn't the update abort when it realizes it's not plugged in or on low battery. He said it had never happened to him before and I have also never seen it.
The other side I notice is with google products. Barring android, GCP, and the less than yearly occassional outage, I would never see a bug in google products. Now I notice them often in drive, sheets, gmail, and specially meet. The other day I joined a meeting and all participants couldn't log in. NEVER have I seen such a bad production bug from google.
Profits over wonderful products I guess
gandreani